Modeling Energy Consumption of Data Transmission Over Wi-Fi

Wireless data transmission consumes a significant part of the overall energy consumption of smartphones, due to the popularity of Internet applications. In this paper, we investigate the energy consumption characteristics of data transmission over Wi-Fi, focusing on the effect of Internet flow characteristics and network environment. We present deterministic models that describe the energy consumption of Wi-Fi data transmission with traffic burstiness, network performance metrics like throughput and retransmission rate, and parameters of the power saving mechanisms in use. Our models are practical because their inputs are easily available on mobile platforms without modifying low-level software or hardware components. We demonstrate the practice of model-based energy profiling on Maemo, Symbian, and Android phones, and evaluate the accuracy with physical power measurement of applications including file transfer, web browsing, video streaming, and instant messaging. Our experimental results show that our models are of adequate accuracy for energy profiling and are easy to apply.