Enhancing the capability and energy efficiency of smartphones using WPAN

Smartphones are constrained in battery-energy and resources such as processing power, storage, and Internet bandwidth. The capabilities of the smartphones can be enhanced if they can access the hardware, software resources and data on a laptop in an energy efficient way. This enables the owner of a smartphone and a laptop to use his/her devices with flexibility. With this view, we propose Universal Computing and Communication Interface (UCCI) to facilitate such sharing of resources between two wireless portable devices using wireless personal area network (WPAN). We developed prototypes of UCCI using BlackBerry 9700 and HTC Nexus One smartphones, and performed experiments on an energy measurement testbed. We show the efficacy of the proposed model through experiments, and evaluated the energy costs of an application which transfers file through 3G, WiFi and Bluetooth links. We also measured the costs of file compression and decompression on a HTC Nexus One smartphone, and discuss how they affect the file transfer costs.