Power-throughput tradeoffs of 802.11n/ac in smartphones

This paper presents the first, to the best of our knowledge, detailed experimental study of 802.11n/ac throughput and power consumption in modern smartphones. We experiment with a variety of smartphones, supporting different subsets of 802.11n/ac features. We investigate the power consumption in various states of the wireless interface (sleep, idle, active), the impact of various features of 802.11n/ac (PHY bitrate, frame aggregation, channel bonding, MIMO) on both throughput and power consumption, and the tradeoffs between these two metrics. Some of our findings are significantly different from the findings of previous studies using 802.11n/ac wireless cards for laptop/desktop computers. We believe that these findings will help in understanding various performance and power consumption issues in today's smartphones and will guide the design of power optimization algorithms for the next generation of mobile devices.