Energy Efficient QoS-Aware Random Network Coding on Smartphones

Random network coding (RNC) technology is known to benefit various facets of information networks; however, there have been concerns for the computational complexity of RNC since its incipience. For instance, RNC’s high complexity can be directly translated into high energy consumption and drain fast smartphone batteries, making it unsuitable for mobile environments. In this paper, we optimize the energy consumption of RNC implementations with a given QoS requirement, especially throughput, for smartphone environments. To this end, we propose a duty cycling approach minimizing the energy consumption of RNC with a given throughput constraint. By manipulating the processor clock frequency controlling mechanism (a.k.a. governor) in Android, our approach can indirectly regulate the processor clock frequency and enhance energy efficiency. Real experiments on Android systems with smartphone application processors such as Samsung’s Exynos 5410, show that our method can reduce the energy consumption of RNC by up to 67% compared to a RNC implementation relying on ondemand governor for frequency control. Finally, we argue that our method can be applied to a wide range of applications by implementing it with a fast Fourier transform algorithm.