Investigating battery consumption in low- end smartphones: preliminary results
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Date
2017Author
Om, Shree
Tucker, William David
Rey-Moreno, Carlos
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Show full item recordAbstract
Due to lack of electricity in the rural communities of Africa, users often
have to incur extra expense on recharging their mobile phones. The limited battery
capacities of low-end smartphones, therefore, present a barrier to their positive
integration with such communities because of their vast networking features that
likely lead to their elevated usage, thus, causing faster battery depletion and in turn,
escalating recharge costs. This paper presents preliminary results of ongoing
investigations on battery consumptions in low-end smartphones in order to
estimate their battery life under different usage scenarios, and estimate the surge in
communication expense brought about from the frequent recharging. Voice call
experiments over WiFi and 3G data, in different network mode combinations, were
conducted using three brands of low-end smartphones. Results, compared using
analysis of variance and Tukey methods for pairwise comparison, yielded
Smart4Mini brand to be the least battery draining, along with Smart Kicka being
second best and Galaxy Pocket Neo being least efficient. In addition, the
investigations aided in building a platform for future experiments in order to
precisely estimate communication costs under different usage scenarios.
Dissemination of such information can assist rural users in making well-informed
communication expenditure towards purchase and usage of low-end smartphones.