RSSI-Aware Energy Saving For Large File Downloading on Smartphones

Smartphones are emerging as a particularly appealing platform for network applications, especially through the WiFi interface. However, WiFi entails considerable energy consumption and smartphones are bottlenecked by their battery capacity. Finding ways to reduce energy consumption of WiFi is more than critical. In this letter, we address the problem of WiFi energy management with the awareness of RSSI properties. Through experiments, we first investigate how the RSSI influences energy consumption. Based on the experimental findings, we propose a simple but effective approach for managing large file downloading in a WiFi environment for smartphones. Simulations show that the proposed method can achieve significant energy savings.