Energy Consumption in Location Sharing Protocols for Android Applications

Sammanfattning: This thesis studies the Message Queue Telemetry Transport protocol (MQTT) as an application layer protocol in geographical location sharing applications using third generation cellular communication (3G). The MQTT protocol is compared in terms of energy efficiency and amount of data generated with the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which is currently used in typical location sharing applications. In order to compare the communication energy efficiency of both protocols a location sharing application prototype was developed for the Android platform. The application allows the use of HTTP and MQTT and was used to perform a number of experiments. The evaluation experiments show that MQTT is a good candidate as a protocol for location sharing. At comparable bandwidth and energy expenses MQTT offers better quality of user experience, since the subscribers are notified at once when the location of clients of interest has changed. The MQTT protocol is more energy-efficient than the HTTP protocol when the number of other uses with whom the client shares location is low and the location updates are frequent. The experiments also indicate that MQTT protocol is more energy-efficient than HTTP protocol in idle state, when there are no location information updates due to inactivity of all the clients, for example, if they are stationary. This is because MQTT client does not spend energy to poll the server for information updates.