A2PSM: audio assisted wi-fi power saving mechanism for smart devices

Abstract

Wi-Fi is the most prominent wireless network interface in current smart devices. Due to its high power consumption, Power Saving Mode (PSM) schemes have been proposed to reduce power consumption. We show how the current popular PSM schemes implemented in nowadays smart devices are inefficient. In this paper, we propose A2PSM: an audio channel assisted power saving scheme for the Wi-Fi interface, which address the inefficiency of the existing power saving schemes in smart devices. In this scheme, we leverage the low power consumption of the audio interfaces (mic/speaker) to reduce the wakeup events of the Wi-Fi interface when it is in Power Saving Mode. In this paper, we develop a small-scale prototype testbed on real smartphones to evaluate the proposed A2PSM scheme. Experiments show that A2PSM could save up to more than 25% more power than the existing schemes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to utilize the audio channel in optimizing the power consumption of Wi-Fi networks.