SMoW: An Energy-Bandwidth Aware Web Browsing Technique for Smartphones

Abstract

With the rapid advancement of mobile devices, people have become more attached to them than ever. This rapid growth combined with millions of applications (apps) make smartphones a favorite means of communication among users. In general, the available contents on smartphones, apps, and web, come in two versions: 1) free content that is monetized via advertisements (ads) and 2) paid content that is 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. These issues necessitate a good understanding of the mobile advertising eco-system and how such limited resources can be efficiently used. In this paper, we present the results of a novel web browsing technique that adapts the webpages delivered to smartphone, based on the smartphone's current battery level and the network type. Webpages are adapted by controlling the amount of ads to be displayed. Validation tests confirm that the system can extend smartphone battery life by up to ∼30% and save wireless bandwidth up to ∼44%.INDEX TERMS Smarphones, energy efficiency, efficient web browsing, web adaptation.

A survey of techniques for improving efficiency of mobile web browsing

“…Comments. The color transformation technique of Dong and Zhong is different from the filtering ‐ and compaction ‐based techniques that change the layout and amount/size of the contents. Although color transformation has the benefit of saving energy without losing any content or changing the layout, it may lead to poor aesthetics and is effective only for OLED displays and not LCD displays.…”

“…Albasir and Naik noted that since ads consume energy and bandwidth, the amount of ads provided should be decided based on the battery level and network. They present a battery‐ and network‐aware technique for performing ad filtering.…”

“…Comments. The limitation of the technique of Albasir and Naik is that sending the information about the network type and battery level to the server may lead to leaking the personal information of the user, since this information may be intercepted by a malicious entity. Moreover, since a server may be communicating with a large number of clients at any time, sending a website version customized to each client may overload the resources of the server.…”

“…From the user perspective, many users prefer desktop versions over mobile versions for a richer experience and familiarity with desktop versions . From the device perspective, given the limited resources of a mobile device, even a professionally designed mobile website may overwhelm the resources of a mobile system .…”

“…Some works study the impact of screen size in relation to the size of webpages. 3 Desktop and mobile webpages/browsers/processors 3,11,13,16,38,54,67,74,75 Cloud and device-local browser 40 Websites with different webpage/image sizes 13,16,27,33,46,52,56 Websites with different update frequency 28,67 Different networks (eg, 3G vs LTE) 8,9,12,15,17,30,40,41,51 Different bandwidth/network conditions 11,13,29,68 Enabling and disabling SPDY 30 Different image formats (eg, JPEG and PNG) 25,29,33,54,57,74 In-order and out-of-order processor 10,44,46 Different phones (eg, feature phone and smart phone) 17,27 Data transfer batching 11,[15][16]…”