Energy and Performance of Smartphone Radio Bundling in Outdoor Environments
Ana Nika
Yibo Zhu
Ning Ding
Abhilash Jindal
Y. Charlie Hu
Xia Zhou
Ben Y. Zhao
Haitao Zheng
Proceedings of 24th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2015)
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Paper Abstract
Most of today's mobile devices come equipped with both cellular LTE and WiFi wireless radios, making radio bundling (simultaneous data transfers over multiple interfaces) both appealing and practical. Despite recent studies documenting the benefits of radio bundling with MPTCP, many fundamental questions remain about potential gains from radio bundling, or the relationship between performance and energy consumption in these scenarios.
In this study, we seek to answer these questions using extensive
measurements to empirically characterize both energy and performance
for radio bundling approaches. In doing so, we quantify
potential gains of bundling using MPTCP versus an ideal protocol.
We study the links between traffic partitioning and bundling performance,
and use a novel componentized energy model to quantify
the energy consumed by CPUs (and radios) during traffic management.
Our results show that MPTCP achieves only a fraction of the
total performance gain possible, and that its energy-agnostic design
leads to considerable power consumption by the CPU. We conclude
that not only there is room for improved bundling performance, but
an energy-aware bundling protocol is likely to achieve a much better
tradeoff between performance and power consumption.