Mobile Ad Prefetching and Energy Optimization via Tail Energy Accounting

Accurately determining the network energy consumption of each software principal when multiple ones are active is the key to mobile energy optimization. Tail energy accounting, which attributes tail energy to individual software principals, remains an open problem. Besides, tail energy has also become a major energy drain, especially in mobile ad modules that generate frequent, intermittent network traffics by on-demand ad downloading. In this paper, we propose a systematic framework for mobile ad prefetching and energy optimization, based on a novel tail energy accounting policy using cooperative game theory. In particular, we maximize the sum of deadline- and energy-aware ad utility, by jointly determining apps' aggressiveness in ad prefetching. The proposed tail energy accounting not only characterizes the energy profile of each app's ad module, a crucial input in energy optimization, but also enables an efficient solution by decoupling decision making of individual apps. The proposed framework is implemented on Android with negligible performance/network overhead. Using real-world apps and usage traces, we demonstrate a significant reduction in mobile network energy consumption by up to 45 percent compared with existing approaches. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first fully implemented ad management system transparent to apps and ad ecosystem.