Power Consumption of IPv6 vs IPv4 in Smartphone
draft-petrescu-v6ops-ipv6-power-ipv4-00.txt

Abstract

This draft documents preliminary results of measuring the power consumption of using IPv6 vs using IPv4 on typical applications on a smartphone. The smartphone is connected on a 4G cellular network with either an IPv6 connection, or with an IPv4 connection, but not both simultaneously.

The preliminary results expose a roughly 5% increase in power consumption on IPv6. More experiments are planned as future work that may confirm or infirm these figures.

Status of This Memo

This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

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This Internet-Draft will expire on September 14, 2017.

Copyright Notice

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Table of Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Terminology
• 3. Power consumption measurements in smartphone
• 3.1. Video streaming use case
• 3.2. Live video streaming use case
• 3.3. Web browsing use case
• 3.4. File download use case
• 4. Future Work
• 5. Security Considerations
• 6. IANA Considerations
• 7. Contributors
• 8. Acknowledgements
• 9. Normative References
• Authors' Addresses

1. Introduction

This document describes preliminary measurement results of power consumption of IPv6 and IPv4 on a cellular smartphone.

2. Terminology

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [RFC2119].

APN: Access Point Network

3. Power consumption measurements in smartphone

We conducted several power consumption in differents use cases. The measurement are done with Greenspector probe. We used the smartphone Huawei mate 8 with an android version 7. In these tests, we used orange SIM card. The smartphone is able to connect to IPv4, or to IPv6 Access Point Networks (APNs) simultaneously, or distinctively. In the smartphone, only the 4G connection is active (not 3G).

The test methodology consist in an automatized test and a probe provided by Greenspector. First, we specify in the automatized test which application we want to monitor and for which duration. Then, we trasfer the test and the probe to the smartphone, launch it and wait till the end of the test. The probe generates a JSON file where measures are stored. We take out the JSON files from the smartphone and send them to Greenspector server in order to be anlyzed. Finally, different metrics (e.g. battery discharge, process CPU, network packets, etc.) are shown in a Greenspector webpage (access available upon request). Some of the measurements are graphically illustrated in a Digital Object; this object is identified by DOI 10.13140/RG.2.2.13454.77122. This Identifier can be resolved by a publically available resolver such as dx.doi.org.

All the measurements presented in this draft are preliminary and may change depending on the details of the measurement conditions.

In order to compare between IPv4 and IPv6 connections in smartphone, we considered four use cases: video streaming from YouTube, live video streaming (no cache), web browsing and file download. First, we run the test, for each of the four use cases, when the smartphone is using 4G connection and IPv4 APN. Then, we run the same tests when the smartphone is using 4G connection and IPv6 APN (distinct connection set up; in each one of these connections only IPv4 is active, or only IPv6 active).

3.1. Video streaming use case

In this use case, we launch a video of 4m44s using Youtube application in the smartphone. We associate the Greenspector probe to Youtube application in order to measure the related power consumption. The measurement results (a significant selection) are shown in Table Table 1. As we can see, in same environment and by moving from the use of IPv4 to IPv6, the battery discharge is increased by around 5%.