Analysis of Energy Consumption of Sorting Algorithms on Smartphones

Abstract

Despite the improvement in hardware and technology, Limited Battery power in Smartphone is still challenging task. Battery lifetime of mobile phones is needed to be improved. As compare to CPU power, HDD capacity, RAM and other hardware components the improvement in battery power consumption and lifetime in the past years is very low. The battery power of a Smartphone may be prolonged by optimizing hardware or software. This paper presents an approach for saving energy through software by choosing the appropriate sorting algorithm. Energy consumption of sorting algorithms like Bubble sort, Insertion sort, Quick sort, Selection sort and Merge sort were measured. The results show that Quick sort is the most energy efficient sorting method on average cases. Bubble sort is the most energy consuming algorithm. Insertion sort is also energy efficient but as the number of input data items increase after a certain value Merge sort outperforms the Insertion sort. This work provides the general guideline to select appropriate sorting algorithm in development of energy efficient Smartphone application. A new term Energy Complexity is also introduced in this paper.