Investigation of Energy Consumption of Mobile Station for Instant Messaging Services

Recently, instant messaging service has been widely used by many users. In instant messaging, mobile users need to notify their instant messaging server of activity information periodically, so that their status should be managed and displayed as active at instant messengers of their buddies. The periodic notification, however, prevents instant messenger from entering sleep mode, and thus, results in energy consumption. Although the energy consumption may not be a big problem for desktop PC, which has stable power source, it is significant to mobile stations (MSs) operated with battery. Since a detailed modeling and analysis on energy consumption of MSs is a prerequisite to understand the effect of various parameters on energy consumption deeply and devise an efficient energy management scheme, we develop a more detailed analytical model of state transitions of MSs for instant messaging services. Then, we apply the model to evaluate energy consumption due to instant messaging services, based on steady state probability of MS states.