Abstract-The rapid growth in the energy consumption of mobile networks has become a major concern for mobile operators. Today's mobile networks' usage is dominated by over-thetop (OTT) applications, and operators are keen to determine the network energy consumed by these OTT applications. With a recent shift in user behavior toward a preference for instant messaging (IM) applications over conventional mobile services, operators are interested in exploring what impact OTT IM applications such as WeChat will have on the energy consumption of a network when compared with a corresponding conventional mobile service. Here, we present for the first time energy assessment models for mobile services based on real network and service measurements to address this need. Using WeChat as an OTT IM application example, our results show that WeChat consumes more network energy than conventional mobile services for both light users and heavy text users due to the network signaling energy overhead. In comparison, for heavy voice users, WeChat consumes less network energy since voice messages are first recorded and then sent in packet bursts. Our findings provide a quantitative analysis of the energy consumption of mobile services, which should be valuable for mobile operators and OTT application developers to improve the energy-efficiency of mobile applications and services.
We proposed an energy model and assessed the access network energy consumed by different mobile services based on both the data and signaling traffic generated by those services REF .
Network Energy Consumption Assessment of Conventional Mobile Services and Over-the-Top Instant Messaging Applications
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
Computer Science