Cutting without pain: Mitigating 3G radio tail effect on smartphones

3G technology has stimulated a wide variety of high-bandwidth applications on smartphones, such as video streaming and content-rich web browsing. Although having those applications mobile is quite appealing, high data rate transmission also poses huge demand for power. It has been revealed that the tail effect in 3G radio operation results in significant energy drain on smartphones. Recent fast dormancy technique can be utilized to remove tails but, without care, can degrades user experience. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme SmartCut, which effectively mitigates the tail effect of radio usage in 3G networks with little side-effect on user experience. The core idea of SmartCut is to utilize the temporal correlation of packet arrivals to predict upcoming data, based on which unnecessary high-power-state tails of radio are cut out leveraging the Fast Dormancy mechanism. Extensive trace-driven simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of SmartCut design. On average, SmartCut can save up to 56.57% energy on average while having little side-effect to user experience.