Statistical analysis of energy consumption of mobile phones for web-based applications in Mauritius

Abstract

According to forecasts, by 2018 the number of mobile phone subscribers worldwide could cross the four billion barrier. Mauritius is also witnessing a major growth in mobile subscriptions and the total number of mobile subscriptions was 1,533,600 in 2013. Recently, there has been a growing concern with regards to the energy consumption of mobile phones which now amounts to a non-negligible figure given the widespread use of mobile phones in web-based applications such as video streaming, social networking, surfing and file transfer. In this paper a statistical analysis of the energy consumption of mobile phones in Mauritius has been made with focus on web-based applications. A survey was first conducted to determine the main types of mobile phones in use in Mauritius as well as the usage rate of web-based applications and the networks used to access the applications. Experiments were then conducted to determine the average energy consumption for social networking, video streaming on YouTube, surfing and file downloads. Two main categories of mobile phones were considered namely Nokia phones running the Symbian Operating System (OS) and Samsung phones with Android OS. Measurements were taken with the Nokia energy profiler and Battery Monitor Widget Pro profiler at four different intervals of the day over 2G, 3G and Wifi networks. From the survey and experimental results, the average energy consumption over a month for running the web-based applications on mobile phones was estimated to be 16.76 MWh for Mauritius. Moreover, an analysis of variance was performed to identify the peak energy consumption periods. The time intervals of 1000–1200 and 1400–1600 were found to have the highest energy consumption.