Kernel level energy-efficient 3G background traffic shaper for android smartphones

Reducing the energy consumption of wireless devices is paramount to a wide spread adoption of mobile applications. Cellular communication imposes high energy consumption on the mobile devices due to the radio resource allocation, which differs from other networks such as WiFi. Most applications are unaware of the energy consumption characteristics of third generation cellular communication (3G). This makes the background small data transfers of undisciplined applications an energy burden due to inefficient utilisation of resources. While several approaches exist to reduce the energy consumption of this best-effort background traffic by means of traffic shaping, we find that they are mostly evaluated with simulations and the actual energy overhead for the traffic shaper itself has not been studied. In order to cover this gap, our work realises an existing energy saving algorithm as a Kernel Level Shaper (KLS) within the Android platform, and measures its energy footprint. The total energy savings of our implementation range from 8% to 58% for emulated real background traffic, that is categorised as best-effort traffic. We further show the implications of running the KLS during live operation of applications as an exploratory study.