Abstract Today’s mobile devices offer a variety of computational, memory, storage, communication and sensing resources. In addition, mobile communication technologies are continuously evolving and mobile networks are becoming more and more complex. Modern mobile devices are capable of supporting a wide range of new innovative applications from real-time location-based tracking to mobile gaming. However, the usage of power-hungry applications, sensors and their demand for 24/7 Internet connectivity requires an efficient energy management mechanism in mobile devices. With the increasing energy limitations, there has been a corresponding rise of energy management solutions proposed by researchers. However, this research area is still immature and existing literature lacks the critical review of recent self organization based energy management techniques. This paper aims to provide a structured overview of the research developments on self organization based energy management techniques used in mobile complex networks. This review paper surveys the state-of-the-art self organization based energy management techniques that have been proposed over the period of 2010–2015. Based on the proposed optimization, we have grouped the existing approaches in different categories, which are further classified at different levels, from energy-efficient operating systems to computation off-loading. With this classification we aim to provide an easy and summarized view of the latest self organization based energy management techniques that can be implemented in mobile devices.