Energy consumption in mobile phones: a measurement study and implications for network applications
Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement conference
Characterizing radio resource allocation for 3G networks
IMC '10 Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement
An untold story of middleboxes in cellular networks
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2011 conference
Periodic transfers in mobile applications: network-wide origin, impact, and optimization
Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World Wide Web
A close examination of performance and power characteristics of 4G LTE networks
Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services
RadioJockey: mining program execution to optimize cellular radio usage
Proceedings of the 18th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking
Screen-off traffic characterization and optimization in 3G/4G networks
Proceedings of the 2012 ACM conference on Internet measurement conference
RILAnalyzer: a comprehensive 3G monitor on your phone
Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Internet measurement conference
Is there a case for mobile phone content pre-staging?
Proceedings of the ninth ACM conference on Emerging networking experiments and technologies
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Mobile phones in the 3G/4G era enable us to stay connected not only to the voice network, but also to online services like social networks. In this paper, we study the energy and network costs of mobile applications that provide continuous online presence (e.g. WhatsApp, Facebook, Skype). By combining measurements taken on the mobile and the cellular access network, we reveal a detailed picture of the mechanisms selected to implement online presence, along with their effect on handset energy consumption and network signaling traffic. We are surprised to find that simply having idle online presence apps on a mobile (that maintain connectivity in the background, with no user interaction) can drain the handset battery nine times more quickly. This high cost is partly due to online presence apps that are excessively ``chatty'', in particular when their design philosophy stems from a similar desktop version. However, we also find that the cost of background app traffic is disproportionately large because of cross-layer interactions in which the traffic unintentionally triggers the promotion of cellular network states. Our experiments show that both of these effects can be overcome with careful implementation. We posit that a two-way push notification system, with messages being sent at a low (regular) frequency and low volume by a network-aware sender, can alleviate many of the costs.