Advanced Power Management Techniques for Mobile Communication Systems

In mobile communications, one of the most precious commodities is power. The mobile host can only operate as long as its battery maintains power. Since batteries provide limited power, a general constraint of mobile communication is the short continuous operation time of mobile devices. Therefore, power reduction and management is one of the most challenging problems in mobile communications. Energy conservation has been largely considered in the hardware design of the mobile terminal and in components such as CPU, disk, display, memory, etc. Significant additional power savings can be also achieved by incorporating low-power methods into the design of network protocols used for data (audio, video, etc.) communication. This paper investigates in details power reduction techniques at the mobile host’s components level, such as CPU, disk drive, screen back light, etc., and at the network protocols level used for data communication. ∗E-mail address: [email protected] †E-mail address: [email protected]