The Effect of Unwanted Internet Traffic on Cellular Phone Energy Consumption

Unwanted Internet background traffic (often called "Internet background radiation") is received to every public IPv4 address. This is a problem for cellular phones with an always-online GPRS connection, because receiving the unwanted sporadic data traffic will cause the cellular radio to be used, which in turn drains the device battery. We present measurements of the effect of unwanted Internet traffic to cellular phone energy consumption, and simulate different 3G fast dormancy timeout values to find out a way to reduce the time the radio is active. The simulations demonstrate that the use of a well-chosen static fast dormancy timeout value enables large power savings without causing too much extra 3G state transition signalling between the cellular phone and the 3G base station.