An Analysis of Power Consumption in Mobile Cloud Computing

Abstract

With the rapid proliferation of mobile devices, mobile cloud computing is emerging as an increasingly omnipresent paradigm enabling users to use battery-powered mobile devices to access a wide range of compute-intensive applications hosted on the clouds. Often, the assumption is that mobile devices consume less power when they access an application run on the cloud than when the application is run on the device itself. This, however, is increasingly questionable with the significant recent progress in improving power efficiency of mobile devices (e.g., using ultra low power GPUs). This paper aims at analyzing and comparing the benefits of these two alternatives using mobile cloud gaming as an example. Our evaluation shows that, despite the recent advances towards reducing power consumption in mobile devices, mobile cloud computing remains the best of the two alternatives in a wide range of scenarios.