Power efficiency profile evaluation for wireless communication applications

Abstract

With the advances on semiconductor technologies, wireless communication applications are an emerging class of applications on battery powered devices. The multitude and complexity of components that implement a large spectrum of communication protocols on these devices requires closer evaluation and understanding in respect to power efficiency. As there is very little analysis on the relationship between wireless specific components and their power profile in the context of mobile wireless communication, we investigate the landscape of wireless communication efficiency methods. Next we apply power efficiency metrics on different wireless systems and analyze the experimental data we obtained through a monitoring application. Evaluation scenarios start with different wireless communication systems (WLAN, Bluetooth, GSM) and then analyze power consumption and efficiency in several scenarios on the WLAN communication system. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008.