Optimizing energy of HTTP requests in Android applications

Abstract

Energy is important for mobile apps. Among all operations of mobile apps, making HTTP requests is one of the most energy consuming. However, there is not sufficient work in optimizing the energy consumption of HTTP requests in mobile apps. In our previous study, we found that making small HTTP requests was not energy efficient. Yet, we did not study how to optimize the energy of HTTP requests. In this paper, we make a preliminary study to bundle sequential HTTP requests with a proxy server. With our technique, we had a 50% energy saving for HTTP requests in two market Android apps. This result indicates that our technique is promising and we will build on the result in our future work.