Energy and Power Measurements for Network Coding in the Context of Green Mobile Clouds

This paper presents an in-depth power and energy measurement campaign for inter- and intra-session network coding enabled communication in mobile clouds. The measurements are carried out on different commercial platforms with focus on routers and mobile phones with different CPU capabilities. Our results for inter-session network coding in Open-Mesh routers underline that the energy invested in performing network coding pays off by dramatically reducing the total energy for the transmission of data over wireless links. We also show measurements for intra-session network coding in three different commercial mobile phones, namely, the Samsung S3, Samsung Ace, and the Sony Xperia, and considering a wide range of generation sizes and field sizes. We compare this processing energy to that of transmitting packets over the Wi-Fi air interface of the mobile phones and show that the former can be up to two orders of magnitude smaller than the latter for small generation and field size. However, the processing energy increases significantly for larger generation and field size. To understand the impact, we apply our measurements to a broadcast scenario demonstrating energy savings of several fold by using network coding.