Mobile phone batteries draining: Is green web browsing the solution?

Providing mechanisms to improve energy efficiency of mobile devices is, in the past few years, one of the important objectives in the field of green computing and energy savings. Several studies have addressed this issue from different point of views, i.e., hardware, software, as well as by analyzing the energy drained by different mobile applications. On the other hand, the energy consumption of Web browsing activities has been poorly addressed, given the lack of analysis about users´ real browsing sessions. We propose in this paper a new methodology that exploits an hardware-based instrumentation to measure energy savings in mobile devices when switching on/off filtering techniques offered by a privacy-enhancing technology. We discuss an extensive experimental study that shows how privacy-preserving mechanisms can help users to protect their privacy, their personal information, and en passant efficiently reduce communication and computation overhead and thus battery consumption.