Transcoding web pages via stylesheets and scripts for saving energy on the client

Abstract

Mobile devices and accessing the web have become essential in our daily lives. However, their limitations in terms of both hardware such as the battery, and software capabilities can affect the user experience such as battery drain. There are some best practices for the web page design that are shown to affect the downloading time of web pages. In this study, we report our experience in applying these practices to see their effect on energy saving. We propose two techniques: (1) concatenating external script and stylesheet files and (2) minifying external script and stylesheets that can be used to transcode web pages to improve energy consumption on the client-side and therefore improve the battery life. We present our experimental architecture, implementation, and a systematic evaluation of these two techniques. The evaluation results show that the proposed techniques can achieve approximately 12% processor energy-saving and 4% power saving in two different client types, 13% improvement in a typical laptop battery life, and 4% improvement in a typical mobile phone battery life.