Performance Testing of Mobile Applications on Smartphones

Abstract

Smartphones became the preferred means of communication among users due to the availability of thousands of applications (apps). Although the hardware and software capabilities of smartphones are on the rise, the apps are primarily constrained by the wireless bandwidth and battery life. In this paper, the authors present a test architecture to: (i) evaluate the energy performance of two different designs of the same mobile app service; and (ii) evaluate the bandwidth and energy impacts of advertisements (ads) on smartphones. The authors' measurements on two video players show that, the proper design results a more energy efficient video players. Next, they compare the bandwidth and energy performance news and magazine websites with ads and without ads. In some cases, ads bandwidth cost reaches 50%, whereas ads energy cost reaches 17.8%. The authors also identified the challenges in reliably performing such tests on a large scale. App developers, users, manufacturers, and Internet Service Providers will benefit from this research.