An optimal power saving scheme for mobile handsets

Power saving is an important issue for mobile handsets since they must rely on their batteries. To reduce the battery consumption of mobile handsets, we propose a fractional threshold-based wake-up mechanism, which switches the system into the sleep mode when the packet-receiving queue is empty, and switches the system on when the number of packets in the queue “reaches” a fractional threshold value. A fractional threshold value can be any real number, instead of just a natural number. In fact, the fractional threshold value indicates the mean threshold value. Our study indicates that the fractional threshold scheme with probability 1 provides an optimal power saving solution. The optimization objective is to minimize switch-on rate while satisfying the quality of service requirement, which is an upper bound of the packet dropping probability