Characterization of power consumption in thin clients due to protocol data transmission over IEEE 802.11

In thin client computing, applications are executed on a network server instead of on the user terminal. Since the amount of processing at the terminal is reduced, thin clients are potentially energy efficient devices. However, a network connection between client and server is required for the transmission of user input and display updates. The energy needed for this intense network communication might undo or even exceed the power savings achieved by the reduction in client-side processing. In this paper, we present experimental results on power efficiency of the wireless platform on the thin client in case of thin client traffic. The discussion is focused on VNC-RFB, a widespread thin client protocol, over an IEEE 802.11 link in three typical user scenarios. The results indicate that a cross-layer approach between application and wireless link layer could potentially lead to important power savings.