Abstract
Currently, mobile devices are the most popular pervasive computing devices, and they are becoming the primary way for accessing Internet. Battery is a critical resource in such personal computing gadgets, network communications being one of the primary energy consuming activities in any mobile app. Indeed, as web-based communication is the most used explicitly or implicitly by mobile devices, HTTP-based traffic is the most power demanding one. So, mobile web developers should be aware of how much energy demands the different web-based communication alternatives. The goal of this paper is to measure and compare the energy consumption of three asynchronous HTTP-based methods in mobile devices in different browsers. Our experiments focus on three HTTP-based asynchronous communication models that allow a web server to push data to a client browser through a HTTP/1.1 interaction: Polling, Long Polling, and WebSockets. The resulted measurements are then analysed to get more accurate understanding of the impact of the selected method, and the mobile browser, in the energy consumption of the asynchronous HTTP-based communication. The utility of these experiments is to show developers what are the factors and settings that mostly influence the energy consumption when different web-based asynchronous communication methods are used, helping them to choose the most beneficial solution if possible. With this information, mobile web developers should be able to reduce the power consumption of the front-end of web applications for mobile devices, just selecting and configuring the best asynchronous method or mobile browser, improving the performance of HTTP-based communication in terms of energy demand.
Highlights
Results of the application of the Spearman correlation (Table 2) confirm what was evident from the scatterplots; there is a strong negative relationship between energy consumption and period in all scenarios. us, short polling periods are associated with high energy consumptions
For experiments of 1 minute (Figures 5(a), 5(b)–7(a), 7(b)), the energy consumption for polling periods of 1 second is around 150–200 joules, while for the rest of the polling periods is around 100 joules, with no significance of the data transmitted. e situation for experiments of 5 minutes is similar (Figures 5(c), 5(d)–7(c), 7(d)), for polling periods of 1 second the energy consumption is around 500–800 joules, and for the rest of the polling periods analysed is around 400 joules. ese differences are slighter for WebSocket
Work e experiments carried out in this paper provided interesting information for software developers about how different asynchronous communication mechanisms for Web applications and browser engines behave from an energy consumption point of view
Summary
We describe the HTTP protocol and the mechanism or technology used by Web application to push data at the application level. WebSocket is a protocol defined in [9], which allows to use the TCP connection established between a browser and a Web server as a full-duplex and persistent socket-like channel for exchanging non-HTTP messages with only a small overhead in comparison to HTTP [10]. Using this connection, the back-end in the Web server is able to actively and asynchronously push data to the client whenever it is available. (1) e client makes an initial handshake and waits for a response (2) When an update is available, the server sends the data to the client through the WebSocket (3) Incoming data are available to the browser through an asynchronous event (method onmessage)
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