Client-Side Energy Efficiency of HTTP/2 for Web and Mobile App Developers

Recent technological advancements have enabledmobile devices to provide mobile users with substantial capabilityand accessibility. Energy is evidently one of the most criticalresources for such devices, in spite of the substantial gain inpopularity of mobile devices, such as smartphones, their utilityis severely constrained by the bounded battery capacity. Mobileusers are very interested in accessing the Internet although it isone of the most expensive operations in terms of energy and cost. HTTP/2 has been proposed and accepted as the new standardfor supporting the World Wide Web. HTTP/2 is expected tooffer better performance, such as reduced page load time. Consequently, from the mobile users point of view, the question arises:does HTTP/2 offer improved energy consumption performanceachieving longer battery life?In this paper, we compare the energy consumption of HTTP/2with its predecessor (i.e., HTTP/1.1) using a variety of realworld and synthetic test scenarios. We also investigate howTransport Layer Security (TLS) impacts the energy consumptionof the mobile devices. Our study suggests that Round TripTime (RTT) is one of the biggest factors in deciding howadvantageous HTTP/2 is compared to HTTP/1.1. We concludethat for networks with higher RTTs, HTTP/2 has better energyconsumption performance than HTTP/1.1.