Smartphone energy consumption of multimedia services in heterogeneous wireless networks

Energy consumption is a key issue that impacts on user quality of experience when delivering rich media services to smartphones via heterogeneous wireless networks. Previous research works have studied the smartphone energy consumption in a broad manner only. This paper focuses on comparative energy consumption investigation of rich media transmissions over 3G and WiFi networks involving a real life smartphone device. In particular, the energy consumption of the CPU and radio interfaces (i.e. HSDPA and WiFi) for different rich media services (i.e. video streaming, interactive video call, file download, web-browsing) is recorded. The results obtained show how deliveries over the WiFi interface are more energy efficient than those over the 3G interface (i.e. up to 36.5% for downloading service). Additionally, the difference between the energy consumption when employing WiFi and 3G is the lowest and highest for web-browsing and file downloading services, respectively. Outcome of the investigation can provide beneficial input for smartphone energy optimization solutions.