Reducing Energy Cost of Keepalive Messages in 3G Mobiles

Mobile phones are characterized by limited energy sources. Saving this energy is therefore a primordial subject. As well as for the low level communication protocols (typically from Physical and MAC layers), unnecessary energy consumption can be caused by the behavior of high level protocols, typically from Application and Transport layers. In this paper, we study the case of a classical but not well-known mechanism, the "keep alive mechanism", that induces increase of the energetic cost on mobile phones. We then propose a solution to reduce this cost and provide NS-3 experimentations that show the resulting benefits.