Analyzing mobile applications and power consumption on smartphone over LTE network

Abstract

The explosive number of applications now available on smart phone type of devices and the availability of high-speed mobile broadband connectivity through 4G networks such as LTE has only increased the challenges in improving battery life of these devices. In this paper, we illustrate the 4G power consumption issues through traffic traces and power measurements on LTE device over commercial LTE network. We analyzed the traces of various applications to understand the traffic characteristics. We also measured the power consumption of the various components of the device. This paper provides the cdf's of the packet size and packet inter-arrival times of background traffic of common applications (e.g., Skype, Google Talk, Twitter etc), and power consumption values and duration of low-power states which are crucial for the innovations and implementation of efficient power optimization mechanisms in LTE networks.