Wi-Fi usage monitoring and power management policy for smartphone background applications

Wi-Fi networks provide us with the connectivity that is ubiquitous and inexpensive cost. With the low-cost factor, most smartphone apps perform several background tasks under Wi-Fi instead of the cellular network, e.g., app update, cloud data backup, etc. The increase of Wi-Fi utilization leads to fast battery-powered draining. To reduce the Wi-Fi power consumption, the existing power management policies put Wi-Fi into a sleep mode when it is idle. However, there are no practical power management policies to manage the Wi-Fi power consumption while it is being used heavily. In this paper, we present a monitoring method and power management policy for Wi-Fi while several background apps are utilizing it. The proposed method can non-intrusively monitor the Wi-Fi usage of background apps at the application framework level (API) in runtime without modifying any source codes of the smartphone operating systems. With the API-level monitoring data, we can apply it to efficiently manage the Wi-Fi power consumed by a specific app which causes the power consumption issue. Our experimental evaluation shows that by applying our method to only one background app, which is the most use of the Wi-Fi network, it results in 8% improvement of the total energy consumption, compared with the default Wi-Fi power management policy.