e-Infrastructure and e-Services for Developing Countries. Third International ICST Conference, AFRICOMM 2011, Zanzibar, Tanzania, November 23-24, 2011, Revised Selected Papers

Research Article

Strategies for Energy-Efficient Mobile Web Access: An East African Case Study

Download
463 downloads
  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-642-29093-0_7,
        author={Le Wang and Edward Mutafungwa and Yeswanth Puvvala and Jukka Manner},
        title={Strategies for Energy-Efficient Mobile Web Access: An East African Case Study},
        proceedings={e-Infrastructure and e-Services for Developing Countries. Third International ICST Conference, AFRICOMM 2011, Zanzibar, Tanzania, November 23-24, 2011, Revised Selected Papers},
        proceedings_a={AFRICOMM},
        year={2012},
        month={5},
        keywords={Energy efficiency Web Proxy and 2G/3G},
        doi={10.1007/978-3-642-29093-0_7}
    }
    
  • Le Wang
    Edward Mutafungwa
    Yeswanth Puvvala
    Jukka Manner
    Year: 2012
    Strategies for Energy-Efficient Mobile Web Access: An East African Case Study
    AFRICOMM
    Springer
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-29093-0_7
Le Wang1,*, Edward Mutafungwa1,*, Yeswanth Puvvala1,*, Jukka Manner1,*
  • 1: Aalto University
*Contact email: le.wang@aalto.fi, edward.mutafungwa@aalto.fi, yeswanth.puvvala@aalto.fi, jukka.manner@aalto.fi

Abstract

The limited battery life of mobile handheld devices coupled with the lack of readily or reliable access to electricity is proving to be a major barrier to both adoption and usage of mobile Internet services in most African countries. Therefore, new methods of energy-efficient delivery of mobile web content are essential for prolonging battery life. This paper discusses and evaluates four energy-saving strategies, namely mobile optimization, HTTP compression, caching and proxy. The proposed energy-efficient proxy achieves at most 60% and 74% energy saving in 2G and 3G networks respectively without affecting user experience. As a case study, we consider usage trends and sample web content from three East African countries (Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda).