Collaborative cellular tail energy reduction

Abstract

While cellular interfaces are known to be main power consumers in smartphones, our measurements reveal that surprisingly, due to cellular tail effect, a substantial ratio of energy drain comes from the low-frequency, low-data-rate background traffic. To reduce cellular tail energy use, existing solutions either require changing application behavior or assume the availability of low-level control of cellular interface (e.g., fast dormancy). We propose a collaborative cellular tail energy reduction approach for background traffic, which opportunistically discovers neighbours using low-power Bluetooth radio and shares their cellular bandwidth. Our evaluation demonstrates up to 90% saving for background traffic energy consumption in urban settings. Furthermore, we define a rigorous fairness notion by adapting the generalized processor sharing concept. Our sharing scheduling algorithm uses this notion to achieve substantial energy saving while ensuring fairness for participating phones.