Pages

'Subconscious' mode that will give smartphones better battery life

Washington, Sept 16: Ever felt frustrated when your cell phone battery is dying or dead? Well, researchers at the University of Michigan have developed a new technology that would extend the battery life.
They said that a new ‘subconscious mode’ for smartphones and other WiFi-enabled mobile devices could extend battery life by as much as 54 percent for users
.

University of Michigan computer science and engineering professor Kang Shin and doctoral student Xinyu Zhang found that even during power saving mode ‘idle listening’ occurs, where the phones are still on alert and do consume high energy.

But the new approach is believed to make smartphones perform this idle listening more efficiently. It’s called E-MiLi, which stands for Energy-Minimizing Idle Listening
.

Shin and Zhang conducted an extensive trace-based analysis of real WiFi networks to see how much time smartphones spend on idle listening.

They discovered that, depending on the amount of traffic in the network, devices in power-saving modes spend 60 to 80 percent of their time in idle listening.

“My phone isn’t sending or receiving anything right now,” Shin said.

“But it’s listening to see if data is coming in so I can receive it right away. This idle listening often consumes as much power as actively sending and receiving messages all day,” he added.

E-MiLi works slows down the WiFi card’s clock by up to 1/16 its normal frequency, but jolts it back to full speed when the phone notices information coming in.

“We came up with a clever idea. Usually, messages come with a header, and we thought the phone could be enabled to detect this, as you can recognize that someone is calling your name even if you’re 90 percent asleep,” he added.

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Share

Twitter Delicious Facebook Digg Stumbleupon Favorites More