How Wi-Fi Drains Your Cell Phone

Some simple changes to the software running on Wi-Fi access points could significantly extend or even double cell phone battery life. That's the finding of a study that investigated why using Wi-Fi on a cell phone, and on some other portable devices, sucks up power so quickly. It found that a protocol designed to reduce Wi-Fi power drain often doesn't work effectively.Eric Rozner at the University of Texas at Austin and colleagues from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Microsoft Research India made the discovery, and they also came up with a fix for the problem. The team began by benchmarking just how much power different models of cell phones needed to use Wi-Fi. "For example, we found that an HTC Tilt's total power consumption increases by threefold when using Wi-Fi," says Rozner, who notes that previous studies have shown Wi-Fi use can account for up to 60 percent of the phone's total energy consumption. "It is somewhat surprising that Wi-Fi consumes so much energy," Rozner says. He explains that a protocol called Power Saving Mode exists to prevent Wi-Fi from draining mobile devices' batteries too quickly. But when the team studied how a variety of access points use this mode, it found that the setup wasted power and unfairly prioritized some devices over others. "We found that current implementations of Power Saving Mode suffer multiple problems," says Rozner. Wi-Fi's hunger for energy is important. "More and more carriers are encouraging their subscribers to reduce 3G usage and instead use Wi-Fi by capping 3G data usage or enforcing certain applications to run exclusively on Wi-Fi," Rozner explains. A mobile device using Power Saving Mode flips its wireless radio between fully powered and a sleep setting, for periods lasting between seconds and tens of milliseconds, to conserve energy. For example, after sending a request for a file from the Web, a phone might sleep if it doesn't receive the file after half a second. While sleeping, the device listens for a beacon message that indicates its data is ready, after which it switches to full power and asks the access point to send it.

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/25651/?a=f