Power consumption testing and optimization for mobile router based on data aggregation and compression

Mobile router is a kind of network entity that can bridge a group of mobile stations to the Internet via a two-hop wireless relay. The running time of current commercial mobile router is quite unsatisfactory, which is typically 3-4 hours between charges. In this paper, we assess the power consumption of different parts (Le. the main board and the 3GIWLAN wireless interface) of a mobile router based on our testbed built on Panda board ES development board, which is called MoRo hereinafter. The testing results show that the wireless communication occupies more than one-third of the total power consumption of MoRo and the unmatched data rates between the two wireless interfaces of MoRo result in unnecessary power consumption on the local higher-rate wireless interface due to its intermittent transmission. Thus, we propose to cache the downloaded application data for one request at the mobile router, aggregate (Le. store and forward) and compress the data (e.g. different FTP (File Transfer Protocol) packets of a file, or different files of a web page), and then forward the bulk data with the size below a threshold to the mobile terminal via the local higher-rate interface all at once. The power testing results indicate that up to 18.4% reduction of the total energy consumption can be achieved.