Impact of video quality and wireless network interface on power consumption of mobile devices

Abstract: During the last years, many improvements were made to the hardware capability of mobile devices. As mobile software also became more interactive and data processing intensive, the increased power demand could not be compensated by the improvements on battery technology. Adaptive systems can help to balance the demand of applications with the limitations of battery resources. For effective systems, the influence of multimedia quality on power consumption of the components of mobile devices needs to be better understood. In this paper, we analyze the impact of video quality and wireless network type on the energy consumption of a mobile device. We have found that the additional power consumption is up to 38% higher when a movie is played over a WiFi network instead from internal memory and 64% higher in case of a mobile network (3G). We have also discovered that a higher movie quality not only affects the power consumption of the CPU but also the power consumption of the WiFi unit by up to 58% and up to 72% respectively on mobile networks.