Data Traffic on Mobile Applications and its Impact on Battery Life Time

Abstract

The energy consumption of mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablet-PCs is a major concern. In this paper a sample application will be analyzed to determine how much energy can be saved by reducing the traffic sent in a wireless network. The application is called ArtNet-DMX-Controller and is built by the author himself. It is an Android application to control stage device such as lamps, beamers, moving heads For sending of data to the exact stage devices a special hardware infrastructure is needed. The backbone of this setup is a star-based computer network. The tablet running the application is connected to this network by Wi-Fi. By reducing the amount of data send to the network lower energy consumption is assumed. To prove this assumption two versions of the app had been tested with the same settings. The old version used to send always, whereas the improved version sends data only when necessary. Chapters 1 and 2 are of fundamental interest, describing why it seems to be important to reduce traffic and who did similar work. Chapter 3 and 4 are describing the application, so that everybody can understand basic principles of the app, which is from utmost interest when interpreting the test results. Chapter 5 alights the measurement and shows the test results, which will be concluded in chapter 6. Chapter 7 shows further improvements to the application and measuring systems.