Implementing ZigBee assisted power management for delay bounded communication on mobile devices

Over the years WiFi has gained immense popularity in networking devices to transfer data over short distances. WiFi communication can consume a lot of energy on battery powered devices like mobile phones. The Standard Power Saving Management (SPSM) which is part of the standard specification for wireless LAN technology has been applied widely. However, it may not deliver satisfactory energy efficiency in many cases as the wakeup strategy adopted by it cannot adapt dynamically to traffic pattern changes. Motivated by the fact that it has been more and more popular for a mobile device to have both WiFi and other low-power wireless interfaces such as Bluetooth and ZigBee, we propose an implementation of a ZigBee-assisted Power Saving Management (ZPSM) scheme, leveraging the ZigBee interface to wake up WiFi interface based on the delay bound to improve energy efficiency. The results obtained by applying this scheme on a Linux environment shows that ZPSM can save energy significantly without violating delay requirements in various scenarios.