Quantifying Benefits of Lossless Compression Utilities on Modern Smartphones

Abstract — The data traffic originating on mobile computing devices has been growing exponentially over the last several years. Lossless data compression and decompression can be es-sential in increasing communication throughput, reducing com-munication latency, achieving energy-efficient communication, and making effective use of available storage. This paper experi-mentally evaluates several compression utilities and configura-tions on a modern smartphone. We characterize each utility in terms of its compression ratio, compression and decompression throughput, and energy efficiency for representative use cases. We find a wide variety of energy costs associated with data com-pression and decompression and provide practical guidelines for selecting the most energy efficient configurations for each use case. For data transfers over WLAN, the best configurations provide a 2.1-fold and 2.7-fold improvement in energy efficiency for compressed uploads and downloads, respectively, when com-pared to uncompressed data transfers. For data transfers over a mobile broadband network, the best configurations provide a 2.7-fold and 3-fold improvement in energy efficiency for com-pressed uploads and downloads, respectively.1 Index Terms — Mobile computing, Measurement techniques