Researchers have invented a technique to squeeze more battery life out of Wi-Fi devices, without the need for any hardware modifications to existing devices. Presented last week at the annual MobiSys conference in Washington, D.C., the technique is called SleepWell and entails having wireless access points coordinate with one another to regulate the "sleeping window" of their associated client devices. Rather than have multiple clients contend for resources in locations with multiple APs, the APs negotiate to share the same frequency channel by dividing it up into non-overlapping time slots.

According to Network World, tests conducted on eight laptops and nine Android smartphones saw the scheduling technique yielding energy reductions to the tune of 38% to 51% across a variety of online applications, including YouTube and bulk TCP data transfers. "The solution is analogous to the common wisdom of [commuters] going late to the office and coming back late, thereby avoiding the rush hours," according to Duke University graduate student Justin Manweiler and Associate Professor Romit Roy Choudhury. The full paper, "Avoiding the Rush Hours: WiFi Energy Management via Trafffic Isolation," can be downloaded here (.pdf).

For more:
- check out this article at Network World

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