A new software program, SleepWell, helps Wi-Fi-enabled smartphones manage downloads and battery life.
W-Fi is a major drain on batteries, especially around other Wi-Fi
devices in the neighborhood (or at Starbucks). In such cases, each device has to "stay
awake" before it gets its turn to download a small piece of the desired
information.
Researchers found that battery drainage in downloading a movie
in Manhattan is far higher than downloading the same movie in a
farmhouse in the Midwest.
Duke University-developed software eliminates this Wi-Fi drainage problem by allowing
mobile devices to sleep while a neighboring device is downloading
information. This not only saves energy for the sleeping device but for competing devices as well.
The new system has been termed SleepWell by Justin Manweiler, a
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 ninth Association for Computing Machinery's International
Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services (MobiSys) being
held in Washington, D.C.
Testing conducted across a number of
device types and situations suggests that SleepWell is a
viable approach for the near future.