The power of smartphones

Abstract

Smartphones have been shipped with multiple wireless network interfaces to meet their diverse communication and networking demands. However, as smartphones increasingly rely on wireless network connections to realize more functions, the demand of energy has been significantly increased, which has become the limit for people to explore smartphones’ real power. In this paper, we first review typical smartphone computing systems, energy consumption of smartphone, and state-of-the-art techniques of energy saving for smartphones. Then, we propose a location-assisted Wi-Fi discovery scheme, which discovers the nearest Wi-Fi network access points (APs) using the user’s location information. This allows the user to switch to the Wi-Fi interface in an intelligent manner when he/she arrives at the nearest Wi-Fi network AP. Thus, we can meet the user’s bandwidth needs and provide the best connectivity. Additionally, it avoids the long periods in idle state and greatly reduces the number of unnecessary Wi-Fi scans on the mobile device. Our experiments and simulations demonstrate that our scheme effectively saves energy for smartphones integrated with Wi-Fi and cellular interfaces.