SleepWell, newly developed software by a Duke University graduate student found helpful to double the battery life of mobile devices – such as smartphones or laptop computers by making changes to WiFi technology.
Wifi is a popular wireless technology that helps users download information from the Internet. Such downloads, including pictures, music, and video streaming, can be a major drain of battery.
The energy draw is especially severe in the presence of other WiFi devices in the neighborhood. In such cases, each device has to “stay awake” before it gets its turn to download a small piece of its desired information. This means that the battery drainage in downloading a movie in Manhattan is far higher than downloading the same movie in a farmhouse in the Midwest, the researchers said.
[advt]The Duke-developed software eliminates this problem by allowing mobile devices to sleep while a neighboring device is downloading information. Not only does this save energy for the sleeping devices, but also for the active device which no longer needs to compete with other devices.
SleepWell is designed by Justin Manweiler, graduate student in computer science, under the direction of Romit Roy Choudhury, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering. The SleepWell system was presented at the 9th Association for Computing Machinery’s International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services (MobiSys), being held in Washington, DC.
“The same is true of mobile devices trying to access the Internet at the same time,” Manweiler said. “The SleepWell enabled WiFi access points can stagger their activity cycles to minimally overlap with others, ultimately resulting in promising energy gains with negligible loss of performance.”
With cloud computing on the horizon, mobile devices will need to access the Internet more frequently — however, such frequent access could be severely constrained by the energy toll that WiFi takes on the device’s battery life, according to Roy Choudhury.
“Energy is certainly a key problem for the future of mobile devices, such as iPhones, iPads, and Android smartphones,” Roy Choudhury said. “The SleepWell system can certainly be an important upgrade to WiFi technology, especially in the light of increasing WiFi density.”
Manweiler emphasized, saying that “the testing we conducted across a number of device types and situations gives us confidence that SleepWell is a viable approach for the near future.”
Roy Choudhury’s research team, known as the Systems Networking Research Group, is supported by the National Science Foundation, as well as from industries such as Microsoft Research, Cisco, Nokia, and Verizon.
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