Energy Consumption of Remote Desktop Access on Mobile Devices: An Experimental Study

Mobile devices have recently become so pervasive that they are increasingly replacing personal computers in everyday activities. However, due to their limited resources, mobile devices cannot offer the same performance of desktop applications. One option to overcome such limitations is given by remote desktop access, wherein the mobile device uses a thin client software to connect to a remote desktop host. When such host is virtualized, remote desktop access becomes a form of mobile cloud networking. Unfortunately, most of the widely used protocols for remote desktop access on mobile devices have been designed for personal computer scenarios. Specifically, their energy consumption at the mobile device has not been fully characterized. In this article, we specifically address energy consumption of remote desktop access on mobile devices. Through experiments in realistic usage scenarios, we show how mainline remote desktop protocols perform by detailing the energy consumption due to the different components involved. We relate the energy consumption to the protocol features and also provide some considerations on aspects related to user experience.