QoS scheduling for energy-efficient wireless communication

Presents a QoS (quality of service) scheduler that assigns bandwidth over a wireless channel such that the amount of energy spent by a mobile device is minimized, while maintaining the QoS of the connections. Energy efficiency is an important issue for mobile computers, since they must rely on their batteries. We have designed and implemented an energy-efficient architecture and MAC protocol for wireless multimedia traffic. The scheduling is based on two mechanisms: (1) short-term transmission frame scheduling that concatenates the uplink and downlink traffic of a mobile device, and (2) long-term scheduling that tries to collect traffic as much as possible within the QoS requirements of the connections. The result is that the transceiver can be in a low-power operating mode for an extended period of time and that the number of operating mode transitions is reduced.