Power management techniques for mobile communication

In mobile computing, power is a hmited r=ouce. Like other devices, communication devices need to be prop erly managed to conserve energy. In this paper, we prment the design and implementation of an innovative trartspori level protocol capable of significantly reducing the power usage of the communication device. The protocol achieves power savings by selectively choosing short periods of time to suspend communications and shut down the communication device. It manages the important task of queuing data for future dehvery during periods of communication suspension, and decides when to restart communication. We *O address the tradeoff between reducing power consumption and reducing delay for incoming data. We present resdts from experiments using our implementation of the protocol. Th=e experiments measure the energy consumption for three simrdated communication patterns and compare the effects of different suspension strategies. Our r-tits show up to an 83~0 savings in the energy consumed by the communication. This can translate to a 6-9% savings in the energy consumed by an entire high end laptop or a savings of up to 40% for current hand-held PCs. The resdting delay introduced is sm~ (0.4-3.1 seconds depending on the power management level).