Context-for-wireless: context-sensitive energy-efficient wireless data transfer

Ubiquitous connectivity on mobile devices will enable numerous new applications in healthcare and multimedia. We set out to check how close we are towards ubiquitous connectivity in our daily life. The findings from our recent field-collected data from an urban university population show that while network availability is decent, the energy cost of network interfaces poses a great challenge. Based on our findings, we propose to leverage the complementary strength of Wi-Fi and cellular networks by choosing wireless interfaces for data transfers based on network condition estimation. We show that an ideal selection policy can more than double the battery lifetime of a commercial mobile phone, and the improvement varies with data transfer patterns and Wi-Fi availability. We formulate the selection of wireless interfaces as a statistical decision problem. The key to attaining the potential battery improvement is to accurately estimate Wi-Fi network conditions without powering up its netwo...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: MOBISYS
• Authors: Ahmad Rahmati, Lin Zhong
• Keywords: Battery Lifetime, Cellular Network Conditions, MOBISYS 2007, Wi-Fi Network Conditions, Wireless Networks