Wake On Wireless: An Event Driven Energy Saving Strategy For Battery Operated Devices

Abstract

The demand for an all-in-one phone with integrated personal information management and data access capabilities is beginning to accelerate. While personal digital assistants (PDAs) with built-in cellular, WiFi, and Voice-Over-IP technologies have the ability to serve these needs in a single package, the rate at which energy is consumed by PDA-based phones is very high. Thus, these devices can quickly drain their own batteries and become useless to their owner.In this paper, we introduce a technique to increase the battery lifetime of a PDA-based phone by reducing its <i>idle power</i>, the power a device consumes in a "standby" state. To reduce the idle power, we essentially shut down the device and its wireless network card when the device is not being used---the device is powered only when an incoming call is received. Using this technique, we can increase the battery lifetime by up to 115%.In this paper, we describe the design of our "wake-on-wireless" energy-saving strategy and the prototype device we implemented. To evaluate our technique, we compare it with alternative approaches. Our results show that our technique can provide a significant lifetime improvement over other technologies.