Saturday, September 17, 2011

Save 50% Of Your Smartphone's Battery Life With Wi-Fi Scaling

Researchers at the University of Michigan suggest that a reduction of the Wi-Fi clock during idle listening could give users more time with their phone.

Engineering professor Kang Shin and doctoral student Xinyu Zhang said that smartphones, including the iPhone, spend up to 80 percent of their power-saving mode in idle listening state, which checks the network for incoming data. However, they also found that this idle listening mode often consumes just as much power as when the phones are fully awake.


At the ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking in Las Vegas, the scientists will present their idea for E-MiLi, which stands for Energy-Minimizing Idle Listening: The technology scales the Wi-Fi clock to only 1/16 of its usual clock to save power. To still be able to recognize incoming messages, they tweaked their smartphones to be focused to detect only message headers. As a result, they found that E-MiLi can reduce energy consumption by around 44 percent for 92 percent of mobile devices "in real-world wireless networks."

The technology requires smartphones to be equipped with processor-slowing software, as well as new firmware for phones and computers that are sending messages. The University of Michigan said it is "pursuing patent protection for the intellectual property, and is seeking commercialization partners to help bring the technology to market."

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