Battery life of mobile peers with UMTS and WLAN in a Kademlia-based P2P overlay

We evaluate the battery life of mobile devices that act as full-fledged peer nodes in a Kademlia DHT based P2P overlay network. The motivation is to find out how long a mobile peer is able to function in a UMTS or WLAN access network, and how the different parameter settings affect this battery life; this is interesting as mobile access to P2P networks is expected to become common in the near future. The majority of the peers in an overlay are simulated on a server array, while the power measurements are conducted on actual mobile devices. The variable overlay parameters are the number of peers, resource lookup activity, and the level of churn. The chosen values of parameters represent a relatively high amount of activity. In UMTS the measured battery life is approximately 3 hours and in WLAN it is 5 to 10 (most often around 8) hours. We also provide power measurements on sending and receiving UDP packets in UMTS and WLAN, for approximating the power consumption of network protocols without protocol-specific measurements.