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Optimizing background email sync on smartphones

Published: 25 June 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Email is a key application used on smartphones. Even when the phone is in stand-by mode, users expect the phone to continue syncing with an email server to receive new mes-sages. Each such sync operation wakes up the smartphone for data reception and processing. In this paper, we show that this "cost of email sync" in stand-by mode constitutes a significant source of energy consumption, and thus reduces battery life. We quantify the power performance of different existing email clients on two smartphone platforms, An-droid and Windows Phone, and study the impact of system parameters such as email size, inbox size, and pull vs. push. Our results show that existing email clients do not handle email sync in an energy efficient way. This is because the underlying protocols and architectures are not designed for the specific needs of operating in stand-by mode. Based on our findings, we derive general design principles for energy-efficient event handling on smartphones, and apply these principles to the case of email sync and implement our techniques on commercial smartphones. Experimental results show that our techniques are able to significantly reduce energy cost of email sync by 49.9% on average with our experiment settings.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    MobiSys '13: Proceeding of the 11th annual international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services
    June 2013
    568 pages
    ISBN:9781450316729
    DOI:10.1145/2462456
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 25 June 2013

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    Author Tags

    1. cellular network
    2. email
    3. energy efficiency
    4. smartphone

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    MobiSys '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 33 of 211 submissions, 16%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 274 of 1,679 submissions, 16%

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