Power consumption overhead for proxy services on mobile device platforms

As mobile data consumption increases, several venues of research investigate energy efficiency and optimizations, oftentimes realized through on-device services; optimization approaches based around on-device optimizations in turn need to overcome the power consumption added by these services. We present a measurement framework for the power consumption of mobile devices based on the Pandaboard (mobile) development platform using the Android operating system. Utilizing the framework, we perform power consumption evaluations for basic web requests as well as HTML5 video streaming to a mobile browser in (i) direct connection and (ii) indirect connections through a mobile proxy server on the device, which represents a baseline for application layer optimization approaches. We find that using the local proxy server on the device for web requests results in very limited overheads, both in terms of power consumption and added delays which tend to remain request size independent. HTML5 video streaming through the proxy service incurs an average energy consumption penalty of approximately one percent. Our findings corroborate that even smaller realized optimization gains through services on mobile devices themselves are not usurped by the service enablers consuming mobile CPU cycles.