EE-AOC: Energy Efficient Always-On-Connectivity Architecture

Mobile platforms, such as laptops, tablets or Ultrabooks, must feature always-on network connectivity to make mobile applications (e.g., email, instant messaging, etc.) visible and accessible to/from the Internet. Always-on connectivity for mobile platforms can be achieved conventionally by periodically exchanging keep-alive messages with their counterparts (i.e., servers). However, frequent message exchange wastes energy because it requires the platform to operate in (or transition to) the active state (e.g., S0) instead of remaining in a long, uninterrupted low-power standby mode. To address this problem, we present a novel and secure, yet simple, architecture, called Energy Efficient Always-OnConnectivity (EE-AOC), that allows mobile devices/applications to be continuously visible and reachable from the network. EEAOC offloads the keep-alive message exchange process to the network device from the host, thus, it does not need to wake up the whole platform. Our experimental results implementing the prototype show that EE-AOC achieves always-on connectivity and application reachability at about 85% lower power (i.e. 6.67X gain) than that needed to provide the same functionalities in today’s platforms. Keywords-Always-on-always-connected; connected standby; energy efficient communications; wireless networks; sleep mode.

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