Energy Consumption Analysis of WLAN, 2G and 3G interfaces

Mobile devices people carry in their pockets every day can use various means to connect to data services all around the Internet, e.g., 2G, 3G and WLAN. This has been an important development towards an easily accessible and always-on the Internet. While radio connectivity, bits rates in particular, has developed tremendously during the recent years, battery technology and electronics has not. Thus, the more we use Internet services on mobile phones, the faster the battery of the device runs out, even within a few hours. This paper analysis various radio technologies found in modern mobile phones, and characterize their power consumption with different uplink and downlink data transfers. We are interested to understand how much energy is needed per bit of user data when sending or receiving data over various wireless links.