Exploiting traffic scheduling mechanisms to reduce transmission cost on mobile devices

Energy consumption of wireless data transmission heavily depends on the shape of the outgoing traffic of the mobile device. In this paper, we propose a traffic scheduler that shapes the packets into consistent bursts based on per-packet performance constraints in order to reduce the overall transmission cost. Our scheduler takes into account the scenarios where multiple network applications run concurrently on the mobile device. We evaluate the traffic scheduler with real-life traffic traces from delay-sensitive applications, e.g. Internet radio and YouTube, and delay-tolerant applications e.g. Web browsing. The results show that depending on scenarios 23% to 72% energy savings can be achieved without noticeable performance degradation. Furthermore, our traffic scheduler is of low time complexity O(n), which makes it suitable to be deployed on proxies or directly on mobile devices.