A little Wi-Fi management can increase your battery life significantly

It is a well-known fact that keeping the Wi-Fi radio on is one of the major factors in reducing a notebook or tablet’s battery life. But at times it is not practical, as many notebooks or tablets come with Wi-Fi only connection possible – and you need to get your work done on time. A solution from Justin Manweiler and Romit Roy Choudhury, students at Duke University, might come to help.

Both of the students jointly released a paper called “Avoiding the Rush Hours: Wi-Fi Energy Management via Traffic Isolation” that explains ways to manage the Wi-Fi connection constructively so that it only uses the energy it needs. The way Liliputing explains it is that when there are a number of Wi-Fi connections available, the Wi-Fi radio has to try harder to connect to any specific access point, ending up using more energy than required. That is because the radio has to keep trying to stay alerted in an effort to send data over the access point if other devices are connected to that as well.

This solution is a new system called SleepWell that allows the Wi-Fi radio to sleep while other devices are sending data over the same connection (Wi-Fi). This could reduce the energy usage by 38%-51% - as promised by the researchers. This could be a significant boost to the battery life, and will ultimately affect your mobility with the system.

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