Managing Your WiFi Better Could Improve Your Device’s Battery Life
According to a course paper submitted by grad students Justin Manweiler and Romit Roy Choudhury of Duke University, changing the way you manage your WiFi when in a WIFi hot zone could result in cutting power consumption by half on your WiFi device. The way to really save on battery life is to turn off the WiFi radio as a whole, but that’s not really useful if you need WiFi connectivity, now is it. Click after the break to read move about how to double your battery life with WiFi on!
When you’re using a WiFi device in a WiFi hot zone, the WiFi radio you have in your device is working overtime in order to stay awake indefinitely, waiting for the chance to send data out to an access point over the same wireless spectrum as other WiFi devices. This, in turn, consumes much more energy than need be. According to the paper (click here to read in PDF form), a new system dubbed “SleepWell” allows a WiFi radio to sleep whilst it waits for its turn to send out data and therefor isolating itself from the wireless traffic from other WiFi devices.
8 laptops and 9 Android phones were tested by streaming video and audio files, as well as sending data over FTP. All devices were able to save power consumption by half using the SleepWell system. WiFi isn’t the only power consumer feature in portable devices, but every little bit helps!
via liliputing
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