A Signal Adaptation Mechanism for Power Optimization of Wireless Adapters

Abstract

This manuscript introduces, implements and evaluates a feedback-based adaptation mechanism that adjusts the transmission power of a wireless card on commodity mobile devices. Main focus of this work is to minimize the power consumption by adjusting the transmission power of the wireless card, thus extending the battery life, while negative effects on connection quality are avoided. To achieve that, a mechanism that optimizes the power depending on the quality of the connection is presented, which measures the quality of the transmission and adjusts the transmission power, by utilizing an expanded array of metrics, for more accurate estimation. The mechanism has been implemented and tested on actual wireless adapters. In order to evaluate, fine-tune and improve the mechanism, a list of real environment experiments has been performed. The results indicate that power consumption can be significantly reduced for nodes that are either almost stationary or slowly moving, without any significant increase in packet loss.