ExploreBP: A Simulation Tool for Mobile Browser Energy Optimization

Abstract

The browser is one of the most commonly used applications. Users tend to pursue a good user experience and care more about the performance of the browser, while ignoring the power consumption of the browser. This paper proposes a method to reduce the energy consumption of web browsing. In order to better quantify the user experience, this paper uses the first screen load time as the evaluation metric of user experience. First, according to the relationship between the network speed and the first screen load time, find the most suitable primary frequency at a specific network speed, and define the point as the balance point. When the primary frequency is greater than the primary frequency corresponding to the balance point, the first screen load time will almost never change. The balance points of different web pages are also different. Then adjust the CPU frequency according to the balance point of the webpage and the network speed, which can reduce the browser energy consumption and reduce the impact on the user experience. At the same time, this paper proposes a simulation tool ExploreBP, which is used to simulate the working state of the network speed and different web pages to find the optimal energy consumption configuration.

This work is partially supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2018YFB1003405), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61702286), the Natural Science Foundation of Tianjin, China (18JCYBJC15600), Open Projects of State Key Laboratory of Computer Architecture, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CARCH201604), and Special Funding for Excellent Enterprise Technology Correspondent of Tianjin, China (17JCTPJC49500).