Assessing Network Energy Consumption of Mobile Applications

Continuous growth in the energy consumption of mobile networks has become a major concern for mobile carriers. Since current mobile networks are dominated by mobile data traffic generated by over-the-top mobile applications, it is crucial for mobile carriers to understand how much network energy is used to deliver these applications. Here, we use real network and application measurements to comprehensively analyze the energy consumption of 12 common mobile applications by breaking down their total energy consumption into data and signaling energy components. The results provide insights into the different proportions of data and signaling energy (due to LTE signaling) for different mobile applications. They show that the energy consumption of a mobile application can vary at different base station cell sites due to different ratios of throughput to physical resource block utilization. We estimate the total monthly energy consumption of all 4G users of a major mobile carrier using conventional mobile services, such as voice and the short messaging service, and two over-the-top applications, i.e. a popular instant messaging application in China and an online video application. The results show that signaling energy consumption may become a major concern for mobile carriers, and that this issue will be exacerbated as the usage of over-the-top applications continues to grow. Energy assessment of mobile applications provides valuable information to enable mobile carriers to improve the energy efficiency of their networks. An energy assessment tool that enables real-time network and service energy monitoring will also assist in developing energy-efficient network policies for diverse applications with different energy consumption profiles. Furthermore, given our signaling energy consumption findings for over-the-top applications, there may be benefits for mobile operators to introduce a surcharge for signaling traffic to mitigate the high signaling energy consumption of some over-the-top mobile applications.