Profiling Power Consumption of VoIP Applications on Android Smartphones

VoIP applications are getting popular due to their features of low cost and convenience. They have a high business potential over Wi-Fi or 3G network for smartphones applications. One possible barrier to the widespread adoption could be the high power consumption. And this in turn is due to higher CPU utilization introduced by sophisticated encryption algorithms for the sake of security. In this research we have studied the power consumption of five popular VoIP applications, including Skype, Viber, Tango, Line and Rynga, on two different Android based smart phones: i. Google nexus S and ii. Taiwan Mobile, over Wi-Fi and 3G network. Besides we also compared the accuracy of two power measurement tools, PowerTutor and Symbolic Regression and Clustering (SRC). As per our experimental results, we observed that Skype has the highest power consumption of 3.544 W in Google Nexus S with 3G. Each VoIP consumes more power in Google Nexus S than Taiwan Mobile with Skype and Tango recorded the highest change of 0.6 W. This is possibly due to the combined effect of differences in CPU frequency and operating system. We also found that the Wi-Fi is more efficient than 3G and SRC is more accurate power measurement tool than PowerTutor.