Smartphone energy consumption models for multimedia services using multipath TCP

Abstract

Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is an evolution of the regular TCP that allows multiple radio interfaces to be used simultaneously by a single connection while presenting regular TCP interface to applications. Although its benefits include better resource utilization, higher throughput and smoother reaction to connection failures, MPTCP does not take energy consumption into account, especially important when using wireless mobile devices with limited power resources. In this paper, we demonstrate that smartphones with MPTCP support consume more energy than those with regular TCP when using the same service and the same network interface. Additionally, novel energy consumption models are developed based on real life measurements on a real life smartphone. The proposed energy consumption models consider four different multimedia-based services (i.e. video streaming, voice over IP, web-browsing and file download) in 3G and WiFi networks when MPTCP or regular TCP are used, respectively.