Impact of packet aggregation on energy consumption in smartphones

With the tremendous growth in mobile applications, communication accounts for a significant portion of a smartphone's total energy consumption. We studied the traffic pattern of smartphones and observed that a good portion of the packets are of small size and the generated traffic is bursty in nature. Motivated by these observations, we propose a Low Energy Data-packet Aggregation Scheme (LEDAS) in this paper. It accumulates a number of upper layer packets into a burst at medium access control (MAC) level, based on accumulation time, size, and number of packets. With this scheme, larger bursts lead to longer inactivity periods during which the communication module can be kept in doze mode. In addition, fewer MAC frames lead to less overheads and contentions in the wireless medium. However, the data packets incur delays due to the accumulation process. We have given a detail flowchart description of the technique. By means of analysis, we have derived expressions for the average values of burst size, burst inter-arrival times, and number of packets in a burst. We also evaluated the efficacy of the technique by simulations and showed the energy-delay trade-offs. Finally, we explained a test-bench to evaluate the energy saving potential of LEDAS on a smartphone.