A View on Mobile Terminal Power Efficiency of Wireless Communication

The evolution of portable and mobile computation systems towards an increased feature set and increasing hardware and software requirements demand, together with the significant increase of market penetration in our modern society, is raising complex problems from a reasonable energy consumption level point of view under different usage scenarios. 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.