Wireless network interface energy consumption

Abstract.With the proliferation of mobile streaming multimedia, available battery capacity constrains the end-user experience. Since streaming applications are expected to be long running, wireless network interface card's (WNIC) energy consumption is particularly an acute problem. In this work, we explore various mechanisms to conserve client WNIC energy consumption for popular streaming formats such as Microsoft Windows media, Real and Apple Quicktime. First, we investigate the WNIC energy consumption characteristics for these popular multimedia streaming formats under varying stream bandwidth and network loss rates. We show that even for a high bandwidth 2000 kbps stream, the WNIC unnecessarily spent over 56% of the time in idle state; illustrating the potential for significant energy savings.Based on these observations, we explore two mechanisms to conserve the client WNIC energy consumption. First we show the limitations of IEEE 802.11 power saving mode for multimedia streams. Without an understanding of the stream requirements, these scheduled rendezvous mechanisms do not offer any energy savings for multimedia streams over 56 kbps. We also develop history-based client-side strategies to reduce the energy consumed by transitioning the WNICs to a lower power consuming sleep state. We show that streams optimized for 28.8 kbps can save over 80% in energy consumption with 2% data loss. A high bandwidth stream (768 kbps) can still save 57% in energy consumption with less than 0.3% data loss. We also show that Real and Quicktime packets are harder to predict at the network level without understanding the packet semantics. As the amount of cross traffic generated by other clients that share the same wireless segment increases, the potential energy savings from our client side policies deteriorate further. Our work enables multimedia proxy and server developers to suitably customize the stream to lower client energy consumption.

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