Experimental Study of Energy and Bandwidth Costs of Web Advertisements on Smartphones

Abstract

With the rapid advancements in mobile devices, users have become more attached to them than ever. This rapid growth, combined with millions of applications (apps), makse smartphones a favourite means of communication among users. In general, the available contents on smartphones, apps and the web, come in two versions: (i) free contents that are monetized via advertisements (ads); and (ii) paid contents that are monetized by user subscription fees. However, the resources, namely, energy, bandwidth, and processing power, on-board are limited, and the existence of ads in websites and free apps can significantly increase the usage of these resources. Therefore, in this paper, we describe an approach that enables the separation of web contents in a number of websites. Having done so, the energy cost due to downloading, rendering, and displaying web ads over Wi-Fi and 3G networks is evaluated. That is, how much energy web ads contribute to the total consumed energy when a user accesses the web. Furthermore, the bandwidth consumed by web ads in a number of well-known websites is also evaluated. The high cost of ads on smartphones must be considered by the designers and vendors of apps.

The evaluation of AdBlock technique implementation for enterprise network environment

“…As World Wide Web (WWW) makes it more intelligent, the implantation of online web ads in website is one of the marketing strategies [1]. Web technologies are currently moving from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, online ads contents are becoming one of the elements and it play a big role in web-eco-system [2]. A new semantic format of embedding online ads which would encourage large publishers to add them to their web sites [3].…”

“…When a webpage is loaded on web browser, it will download all the information of the website and also online ads. Furthermore, the process of fetching, rendering and displaying the web contents require a lot of traffic being generated which included extra code for ads [2]. When number of broadcasting increased, network congestion will exist due to excessive amount of broadcast messages occupied the bandwidth of communication channel thus the message could not be delivered properly due to packet loss during transmission [10].…”

“…According to [14], they had comparing the webpage load time with and without AdBlock implementation; and they able to detect a few hundred milliseconds of delay in webpage load. The relationship between number of requests made and TCP connection may lead to more bandwidth consumption [2]. The increase in traffic and data exchange can create the complication in congestion control once the transmissions occurred between one user and multiple users [11].…”

“…Previous AdBlock technique aims to block ads across the client devices where it applied as plug-in extensions in web browser such as Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome etc. However, having such plug-ins working in the background requires extra activities and computational power [2]. According to [14], the default setting of AdBlock Plus; it has the future of allowing certain "acceptable ads" to be display on the web.…”

A QUIC Look at Web Tracking

“…They do not require an tracker to actively request information from a user's browser. This saves additional delays and bandwidth consumption, which otherwise restricts the practical applicability of such tracking methods [2]. For example, a thirdparty tracker hosting popular web fonts would directly affect the page load time of a website by performing browser fingerprinting and consequently impair the user experience [15].…”