Boffins boost battery life with underclocked Wi-Fi

Scientists from the University of Michigan have devised a new power management system that can dramatically improve the lifespan of radio devices just as smartphones and laptops.

Engineering professor Kang Shin and doctoral student Xinyu Zhang have developed a technique for saving the battery life of Wi-Fi devices by clocking down Wi-Fi radio system to 1/16th of their normal idling power output. Dubbed Energy-Minimizing Idle Listening, the system works with current Wi-Fi innovation, and it can extend the life of a battery by up to 54 per cent, according to the boffins

The two will be presenting their paper on the subject on September 21 at the ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking in Las Vegas. They are now working on other power-saving techniques for Wi-Fi, exactly looking at regulating voltage directly.

The servers

This paper looks at cloud architecture in which the servers and networks in the data center can rapidly respond to changing demands.