Energy-Efficient Web Browsing over IEEE 802.11 Wireless Networks

The advent of wireless networks and World Wide Web enables more and more users to access Internet services by means of mobile devices through wireless links. However, most mobile devices are batter-powered and thus energy efficiency is a critical factor. The Wireless network interface card (WNIC) is a significant contributor to the total energy consumption on many mobile devices. Therefore, we propose a novel WNIC power-saving scheme for Web browsing applications, the scheme tracks network connections and get hints of when transferring WNIC into low power mode to save energy. In the request/response cycle of Web browsing, the network is in idle state during the waiting-for-server period and the connection-inactive period, during those periods WNIC could be transferred to power-save mode. The length of waiting-for-server period is predicted based on round trip time of the connection, while connection-inactive period is identified with hints got from HTTP and TCP protocol. Real-world experiments show that our scheme achieves a good balance for the competing goals of application performance and energy conservation.