Energy consumption of smartphones and IoT devices when using different versions of the HTTP protocol

HTTP is frequently used by smartphones and IoT devices to access information and Web services. Nowadays, HTTP is used in three major versions, each introducing significant changes with respect to the previous one. We evaluated the energy consumption of the major versions of the HTTP protocol when used in the communication between energy-constrained devices and cloud-based or edge-based services. Experimental results show that in a machine-to-machine communication scenario, for the considered client devices – a smartphone and a Single Board Computer – and for a number of cloud/edge services and facilities, HTTP/3 frequently requires more energy than the previous versions of the protocol. The focus of our analysis is on machine-to-machine communication, but to obtain a broader view we also considered a client–server interaction pattern that is more browsing-like. In this case, HTTP/3 can be more energy efficient than the other versions.