Energy consumption of IEEE 802.11 connected consumer electronic devices

To use a smartphone as a remote controller for consumer electronic devices, the integrated wireless communication interfaces provide access to common network protocols. Especially the IEEE 802.11 protocol family is widely used. On current smartphones this family provides three different modes of operation for different network topologies. Since energy usage is critical in mobile devices, this paper compares the annual energy usage of the infrastructure, ad hoc and Wi-Fi Direct mode based on a simple usecase.