Stratus: Energy-Efficient Mobile Communication using Cloud Support

Cellular radio communication is a significant contributor to battery energy drain on smartphones, in some cases inflating the energy cost by a factor of 5 or more compared to the energy cost of the base device. Stratus is a system to reduce this energy consumption by leveraging cloud resources to make data communication on smartphones more efficient. Using a cloud-based proxy, Stratus employs optimizations that adapt an application’s incoming and outgoing traffic to better match the energy characteristics of the radio interface. The optimizations include (a) aggregation to bunch up sporadic transmissions, (b) asymmetric dictionary-based compression to reduce the number of bits transmitted over the air, and (c) opportunistic scheduling to avoid communication during periods of poor signal reception. These optimizations can be used individually, or in combination, subject to an application’s delay tolerance. For example, using our Stratus prototype, the aggregation and compression optimizations together achieve up to 50% energy savings for web browsing, while the aggregation and scheduling optimizations together achieve up to 35% energy savings for a media streaming application.