ZigBee-Assisted Power Saving Management for Mobile Devices

WiFi transmission can consume much energy on energy-constrained mobile devices. To improve energy efficiency, the Power Saving Management (PSM) has been standardized and applied. The standard PSM, however, may not deliver satisfactory energy efficiency in many cases as the wakeup strategy adopted by it cannot dynamically adapt to traffic pattern changes. Motivated by the fact that it has been more and more popular for a mobile device to have both WiFi and other low-power wireless interfaces such as Bluetooth and ZigBee, we propose a ZigBee-assisted Power Saving Management (ZPSM) scheme, leveraging the ZigBee interface to wake up WiFi interface on demand to improve energy efficiency without violating delay requirements. The simulation and prototype-based experiment results have shown that ZPSM can save energy significantly without violating delay requirements in various scenarios.