A power saving architecture for web access from mobile computers

Abstract

This work proposes new power-saving strategies for mobile access to the Web. User mobility is a key factor in the evolution of Web services. Unfortunately, the legacy approach for Web access is very inefficient when applied to mobile users. One of the critical issues is the inefficient usage of energetic resources when adopting the legacy TCP/IP architecture for Web access from mobile devices. In this paper we address this problem by proposing a new architecture, namely PS-Web, which works at the transport layer and exploits some knowledge about the application behavior. PS-Web is transparent with respect to the application and independent from the sub-network technology. We implemented a prototype of PS-Web. Experimental results provided by this prototype have shown that a relevant energy savings (about 70% on average) can be achieved with respect to the legacy TCP/IP approach. Furthermore, power saving is obtained without a significant degradation in the QoS perceived by the users. Specifically, PS-Web introduces almost neglible additional delays (with respect to the legacy approach) in the downloading of a Web page.