Energy Efficient Client-Centric Shaping of Multi-flow TCP Traffic

Energy consumption is a concern with mobile de-vices nowadays. Network interfaces are among the most power hungry components in these devices. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a client-centric protocol for energy efficiency. Inspired by earlier work, our protocol works by exploiting the TCP flow-control mechanism to shape incoming traffic into bursts in order to utilize the unused bandwidth between the server and the client. Our solution works with multiple simultaneous connections and it is extensible to different scheduling policies. Furthermore, the purely client-centric nature of the protocol enables easier deployment of the solution. The protocol is application independent and it is targeted for bulky TCP transfers. The solution can be used on Linux based systems and is kept portable as it can be deployed with different wireless devices without major modifications. We have tested our solution with real web-servers and our results show that the protocol can achieve sleep time up to 80% and 45% of total duration of one and four active simultaneous connections, respectively.