A study on creating energy efficient cloud-connected user applications using the RMVRVM paradigm

Abstract

Many applications that run on smartphones are heavy on User Interface (UI) and depend on back-end services deployed on the cloud to fetch the required data through REST-based API. Because of the large number of devices actively being used, their collective energy consumption is very significant. Saving energy on these devices is beneficial not only for reducing the carbon footprint but also for the end users as it results in longer battery life. The data fetched by these applications using the REST API is generally processed, filtered and made compliant with the user interface through a paradigm called the Model View View-Model (MVVM).In our previous work Singh (2022a), we proposed a novel Remote-Model View Remote-View-Model (RMVRVM) paradigm to reduce battery consumption by MVVM-based UI-centric cloud-connected applications. In this paper, we present new results and details of the architecture and properties of the RMVRVM paradigm, discuss the complexity shift, provide a migration framework to help practitioners migrate the existing MVVM-based applications and also discuss the possibility of RMVRVM replacing MVVM. We apply the migration framework on an open-source MVVM application and run the experiment to prove the efficacy of RMVRVM. We also expanded the experiments to include the iOS platform and 4G network. To cover the complexity shift to server-side, we discuss the energy consumption on the cloud and how energy-saving practices in cloud data centers help save overall energy consumption.