An Energy Efficient WLAN Skype Deployment Using GSM Wakeup Signals

Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony such as Skype is an emerging killer application for enterprise wireless LANs (WLAN), which promises to greatly improve the reach ability and mobility of enterprise telephony service at low cost. Devices such as smart phone with multiple wireless interfaces play a great role in VoIP over WLAN. However, the high energy consumption of WiFi interfaces, limits the widespread use of VoIP on smart phones. In this paper we propose an energy efficient WLAN Skype deployment to address this problem, in which we use GSM interface with lower energy consumption, to wake up the WLAN radio. We present the analysis result to show that the presented approach can significantly reduce the energy consumption for Skype calls over WLAN.

I. Introduction

VoIP has a number of benefits over traditional telephone services such as convergence of technologies which allows for a flexible and fuller communication experience. Among these, Skype is one of the most popular software at present.