Experimental Evaluation of WiFi Active Power/Energy Consumption Models for Smartphones

Abstract

We conduct an extensive experimental evaluation of a class of WiFi active power/energy consumption models for smartphones that are based on parameters readily available to the upper layers of the protocol stack. We first consider a number of parameters used by previous models and show their limitations. We then focus on a recent approach modeling the active power consumption as a function of the application layer throughput. We study the properties of a previously proposed throughput-based model in relation to other parameters such as the packet size and/or the transport layer protocol, and we evaluate its accuracy under a variety of scenarios that have not been considered in previous studies. Our results show that the model works well in a number of scenarios, with both 802.11n- and 802.11ac-equipped smartphones, and its accuracy can be largely improved with the knowledge of transport layer protocol and packet size. However, such knowledge makes the model more complex and results in largely reduced accuracy in high throughput settings or on hardware different from the one that was used for training. We further discuss a few practical issues related to the measurement and modeling methodology.