Low Power Consumption Solutions for Instant Messaging on Mobile Devices

Instant messaging (IM) services enable real-time text and multimedia exchange and online presence awareness. Users typically log onto IM services persistently in order to discover available friends and also to be discovered. However, our analysis shows that running a desktop-oriented IM client on a mobile device over a cellular or a wireless LAN network incurs massive power consumption. Such power consumption penalty can render persistent-IM infeasible for battery-powered mobile devices. The reason for the power penalty lies in the fact that IM must communicate with the network frequently to exchange presence information with remote entities. In this paper, we propose several low power consumption solutions for IM on mobile devices. By reducing the network accesses and keeping mobile devices in the sleep mode as much as possible, these solutions achieve significant power saving. We implement the proposed solutions using a Jabber-based architecture. We also present power measurement results under this implementation. The results agree with our analysis very well.