Storage on Your SmartPhone Uses More Energy Than You Think

Energy consumption is a key concern for mobile devices. Prior research has focused on the screen and the network as the major sources of energy consumption. Through carefully designed measurement-based experiments, we show that for certain storage-intensive workloads, the storage subsystem on an Android smartphone consumes a significant amount of energy (36%), on par with screen energy consumption. We analyze the energy consumption of different storage primitives, such as sequential and random writes, on two popular mobile file systems, ext4 and F2FS. In addition, since most Android applications use SQLite for storage, we analyze the energy consumption of different SQLite operations. We present several interesting results from our analysis: for example, random writes consume 15× higher energy than sequential writes, and that F2FS consumes half the energy as ext4 for most workloads. We believe our results contribute useful design guidelines for the developers of energy-efficient mobile file systems.

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