Energy efficiency of lossless data compression on a mobile device: An experimental evaluation

Lossless compression and decompression are routinely used in mobile computing devices to reduce the costs of communicating and storing data. This paper presents the results of an experimental evaluation of common compression utilities on Pandaboard, a development platform similar to current commercial mobile devices. We study the compression ratio, compression and decompression throughput, and energy efficiency of different usage scenarios typical for mobile computing. We observe a wide variety of energy costs associated with data compression and provide practical guidelines for selecting the most energy-efficient configurations.