Demonstrating the stalling events with instantaneous total power consumption in smartphone-based live video streaming

The smartphone usage nearly tripled in 2011 according to Cisco Virtual Networking Index. There is a high demand of energy for using popular mobile applications, which run on smartphones with limited battery life. Video streaming applications are widely used on mobile devices, and their high power consumption exhibits high variance during a live streaming session, due to varying conditions on network and application levels. Recent studies focus on the averaged power consumption statistics, while there is lack of observation on the fluctuations of the instantaneous total power consumption of the smartphones. Network based applications consume power at all layers of the communication stack, and any fluctuation in the total power consumption during a video streaming can reveal a possible misbehaviour such as a stalling event. Until now, these events are investigated in Quality of Experience (QoE) studies through installation of high-energy demanding and hard-to-deploy network measurement tools on users' mobile devices. In this paper, we demonstrate an experiment, where a user experiences a stalling event on the smartphone and observes the live instantaneous power consumption values through Mobile Power Monitoring Tool (MPMT) and Software Visualisation Tool (SVT), simultaneously. We confer that the instantaneous total power consumption likely reveals the misbehaviours such as stalls during a video playout in live video streaming on smartphones that can facilitate energy efficient QoE studies.