Towards Energy Optimization Based on Delay-Sensitive Traffic for WiFi Network

To improve user experience, reducing energy consumption of a wireless device is an important factor. Several smartphones try to save energy by tearing down connections to the mobile network as soon as the data transmission has completed. However, the side effect is the frequent connection reestablishment in applications where small amounts data are sent and received, leading to a high energy overhead in the mobile network. This paper presents an optimization mechanism to buffer the network packages. The packages are classified according to the urgency of application, and then combined with the original Power Save (PS) mode mechanism of WiFi to dynamically regulate the data transmission. Therefore, urgent application data will be transmitted immediately while others would be delayed for different intervals. Our experiments show that the optimization mechanism can improve the network response time for the foreground application, reduce the energy consumption of WiFi for background application, as well as reduce the energy consumption for background application when the screen is locked.