Framework for Energy-Aware Lossless Compression in Mobile Services: The Case of E-Mail

Energy consumption caused by wireless transmission poses a big challenge to the battery lifetime of mobile devices. While the potential of using lossless compression for saving energy has been long acknowledged, no general solution has been proposed for applying lossless compression to energy adaptation for mobile services. We propose a proxy-based energy adaptation framework, in which the data to be transmitted is losslessly compressed on a proxy server according to context-aware policies. The context includes factors relevant to computational and communication cost, as well as the user's preferences. We showcase a context-aware policy which aims at minimizing clientside energy consumption caused by transmission and decompression. Using our framework, we implement an energy-aware mobile e-mail service, and present power measurement results that show significant energy savings.