HIDE: AP-Assisted Broadcast Traffic Management to Save Smartphone Energy

WiFi is a major source of energy consumption on smartphones. Unfortunately, a non-negligible portion of the WiFi energy consumption is spent for frames that are useless to the smartphone. For example, energy is wasted to receive WiFi broadcast frames that are not needed by any smartphone application. What's worse, in order to process the broadcast frames received, a smartphone in suspend mode switches from suspend mode to high power active mode and stays there for a while. As such, additional energy is wasted to do the processing. In this paper, we design a system, namely HIDE, to reduce smartphone energy wasted on useless WiFi broadcast traffic. With our system, smartphones in suspend mode do not receive useless broadcast frames or wake up to process useless broadcast frames. Our trace-driven simulation shows that the HIDE system saves 34%-75% energy for Nexus One when 10% of the broadcast frames are useful to the smartphone. Our overhead analysis demonstrates that our system has negligible impact on network capacity and packet round-trip time.