Energy-Aware Web Browsing on Smartphones

Smartphone based web browsing wastes a lot of power when downloading webpages due to the special characteristics of the wireless radio interface. In this paper, we identify these special characteristics, and address power consumption issues through two novel techniques. First, we reorganize the computation sequence of the web browser when loading a webpage, so that the web browser can first run the computations that will generate new data transmissions and retrieve these data from the web server. Then, the web browser can put the wireless radio interface into low power state, release the radio resource, and then run the remaining computations. Second, we introduce a practical data mining based method to predict the user reading time of webpages, based on which the smartphone can switch to low power state when the reading time is longer than a threshold. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our energy-aware approaches, we develop a testbed with Android phones on T-Mobile UMTS network. Experimental results show that our approach can reduce the power consumption of smartphone by more than 30 percent during web browsing. Moreover, our solution can further reduce the webpage loading time and increase the network capacity.