Energy Efficient Scheduling for Mobile Push Notifications

Abstract

Push notifications are small and succinct messages used by mobile applications to inform users of new events and updates. These notifications are pushed to the user devices by a set of dedicated notification servers (e.g., Apple Push Notification Server, Google Cloud Messaging Server, etc.) as they arrive from the content providers of the mobile applications. However, due to their intrinsic small size and sporadic nature, the transfer of these messages is not power efficient, especially on cellular networks. To address this, we propose a network centric scheduling mechanism that delays the delivery of these messages as appropriate by sensing and predicting users' cellular network activities. A trace based evaluation with 60 users' cellular network logs of 30 days shows that we can reduce the energy consumption of mobile devices by 10% for an average delay of 150 seconds in notification delivery. As a network based system that does not require any modifications to user devices, scheduling push notifications opens up interesting opportunities for mobile operators to provide value added and differentiating services, especially considering the sharp rise of non-critical push notification messages.

Encrypted Traffic Classification Based on Unsupervised Learning in Cellular Radio Access Networks

“…As a consequence of the low transmitted data, session throughput is very low (≈2 kbps). Such a description fits with push notifications, consisting of lightweight audio or visual cues sent by specific servers (e.g., Google Cloud Messaging Server) to inform users about unread messages or updates in applications [43]. This group may also include some radio connections comprising only a TCP FIN or RESET packet, appearing when these packets are delayed more than the user inactivity timer [33].…”

“…), which is the less datademanding of the most popular services in current mobile networks [42]. Such a threshold is also the maximum size of push notifications used by mobile applications to inform users of new events and updates [43]. • Low volume (LV) block, comprising connections with V DL < 300 B.…”

The Impact of Instant Messaging on the Energy Consumption of Android Devices

“…Acer et al [3] focused on energy efficient scheduling of push notifications. It argues that due to the sporadic nature of such messages and very small size, sending them immediately to the users device comes with a large cost to both energy consumption and network load.…”

PRISER: Managing Notification in Multiples Devices with Data Privacy Support

“…Having as a requirement that smartphones should always be connected, they are shipped with various communication interfaces (e.g., Wi-Fi, NFC, Bluetooth) [39]. Regarding power consumption [43] demonstrates that delaying the delivery of notifications can generate power savings on mobile devices.…”