Energy consumption measurement of wireless interfaces in multi-service user terminals for heterogeneous wireless networks

For future generation mobile networks, we expect that the mobile devices like PDAs, note PCs or any VoIP-enabled communicators will have the feature of being always switched on, ready for service, constantly reachable by the wireless Internet. In addition to high access speed, attractive real-time contents or other expected spectacular features of the future wireless Internet environment, the mobile terminals has to be very much energy-aware to enable literal untethered movement of the user. Mechanisms for network activities like maintaining location information and wireless system discovery, which require regular network access, should be energy-efficient and resource-efficient in general. Cellular systems employ the notion of passive connectivity to reduce the power consumption of idle mobile hosts. In IP based Multi-service User Terminal (MUT) that may have multiple wireless interfaces for receiving various classes of services from the network, there should be an efficient addressing of the energy consumption issue. To devise an energy-efficient scheme for simultaneous or single operation of the wireless interfaces attached to such terminals we should have comprehensive understanding of the power consumption of the devices/modules in various operational states. This paper investigates the power consumption pattern or behavior of some selected wireless interfaces that are good candidates for being part of the future of the multi-service user terminals. We propose a simple model for predicting energy consumption in a terminal attributed to the wireless network interfaces. We measured the actual consumption pattern to estimate the parameters of the model.