NetMaster: Taming Energy Devourers on Smartphones

Smartphones nowadays are installed with diverse applications, each of which consumes energy and bandwidth. As more and more applications are crowded into a smart- phone, they cause serious problems with regard to battery life and bandwidth utilization. Existing proposals to tackle such challenges usually resort to two ways: avoiding energy- consuming network activities or improving communication efficiency in terms of power consumption. Those approaches either affect the smartphone users´ experience, or offer little benefit in prolonging the battery life. Motivated by insightful understanding of users´ habit, we in this paper propose a novel approach to orchestrate network activities of smartphone applications, based on user´s habit. We implement our approach on smartphones as a middleware service called NetMaster. The performance evaluation with real traces shows that NetMaster reduces energy consumption of network activities by 77.8% in average and increases network bandwidth utilization by over 200%. The user experience is surprisingly well preserved. The chance of undesired interrupt during normal usage is less than 1%.