A network-assisted system for energy efficiency in mobile devices

We present the design and implementation of Scepter, a system with explicit infrastructure support to reduce energy consumption and improve battery life of mobile devices. Scepter focuses on effective techniques that can reduce the total number of bits transmitted to communicate the same information from a mobile device to a base station. Scepter combines multiple techniques into a single unified architecture by utilizing a stateful proxy located within the infrastructure close to the wireless base station. Scepter intentionally introduces asymmetries in wireless communication tasks between a mobile device and the stateful proxy to provide greater energy advantages to the mobile device. In this work, we have implemented all capabilities of Scepter as various kernel- and user-level enhancements. Our detailed evaluation demonstrates the performance advantages of Scepter. In various experiments with different wireless conditions and traffic patterns, Scepter improves the energy consumption of these devices between 15% and 54%.