April 20, 2005

Power Modeling and Optimization for Wireless Systems

Luca Negri, PhD Student at Politecnico di Milano, Italy
 

Abstract: Battery-powered mobile devices featuring wireless connectivity are becoming part of everyday life. In a functional breakdown of their power budget, communication accounts for a steadily increasing share of the total power; this is pushing research on power management of the wireless interfaces.The key to effective power management is power modeling. However, very often simplistic models based on a few power figures are employed in power optimization of wireless networks. On the other hand, system-level models tend to be implementation dependent.We present a statecharts-based power modeling methodology featuring variable granularity and low computational burden, which can be applied to any (wireless) protocol. The outcoming models are in a first phase implementation-independent, and subsequently characterized for specific implementations.In particular, we present the case study of Bluetooth and 802.11 devices, along with selected scenarios for which we have optimized power consumption. Finally, we present StateC, an automatic framework we are designing to automatically build a SystemC power simulator starting from the statechart power model of a generic protocol.

 

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