Application-centric Wi-Fi energy management on smart phone

Vast majority of the services running on the smart phone today are networked in that significant amount of communication is required. Smart phone energy expenditure due to Wi-Fi communications constitutes significant portion of the battery discharge. In this paper, we first investigate the key factors influencing Wi-Fi energy consumption, and propose three energy management schemes: 1) Dynamic control of Wi-Fi on/off interface; 2) improve communication efficiency via application packing; and 3) elongation of Wi-Fi Power Save Mode (PSM) via application alignment under mixed application workload. We also design and test our solution as a device-side application utilizing general system process scheduling and network firewall techniques. As the result, our solution is easy to deploy, applicable to most mobile devices, and we explicitly tackle the challenging case of download management. Through extensive experimentation and solution prototyping, we show the effectiveness of device side Wi-Fi energy management and the importance of considering application characteristics.