Characterizing Multi-radio Energy Consumption in Cellular/Wi-Fi Smartphones

Abstract

Cellular networks evolved to meet the ever increasing traffic demand by way of offloading mobile traffic to Wi-Fi network elements. Exploiting multi-radio interfaces on a smartphone has recently been examined with regards to heterogeneous bandwidth aggregation and radio switching. However, how a smartphone consumes its energy in driving cellular and Wi-Fi multi-radio interfaces, is not well understood. In this paper, we revealed the energy consumption behavior of 3G cellular and Wi-Fi multi-radio operations of a smartphone. We modified smartphone’s firmware to enable multi-radios operations simultaneously and we performed extensive measurements of multi-radio energy consumption in a real commercial network. From the measured data set, we established a realistic multi-radio energy consumption model and it gave 98% stability from the derived coefficients.