Integrated Power Management for Mobile Computers

Recently the mobile community has focused on techniques for reducing the energy consumption of mobile hosts. These power management techniques typically target communication devices such as wireless network interfaces, aiming to reduce the usage, and thus the energy consumption, of the particular device itself. We observe that optimization of a single device's energy consumption, without considering the effect of the strategy on the rest of the machine, can have negative consequences. We propose power management techniques addressing mobile host communications that encompass all components of a mobile host in an effort to optimize total energy consumption. Specifically, we perform runtime adaptation of communication parameters in order to minimize the energy consumed during communication, using information about the network environment to compensate for additional energy consumption due to the dynamic nature of the services available from wireless communication devices. Our results show that power management can be achieved without sacrificing the QoS provided to the application