Energy Consumption of Mobile YouTube: Quantitative Measurement and Analysis

YouTube launched a customized Web site for mobile devices, which is gaining popularity among users. However, accessing multimedia based Internet services from mobile devices consumes energy, the most critical resource of handheld devices. The energy consumption of YouTube for mobile devices has not been widely studied. In this paper, we present a quantitative study of YouTube's energy consumption in mobile devices based on the measurements carried out on Nokia S60 mobile phones. We further investigate the energy characteristics based on network access technology (WCDMA and WLAN), download technology and storage media used. Our experimental results show that network transmission using WCDMA consumes more energy than when using WLAN. In addition, the power consumption is relevant with the status of network interfaces, and the impact on energy consumption based on the storage media used can be ignored.