Power Aware Management Middleware for Multiple Radio Interfaces

Modern mobile phones and laptops are equipped with multiple wireless communication interfaces, such as WiFi and Bluetooth (BT), enabling the creation of ad-hoc networks. These interfaces significantly differ from one another in their power requirements, transmission range, bandwidth, etc. For example, BT is an order of magnitude more power efficient than WiFi, but its transmission range is an order of magnitude shorter. This paper introduces a management middleware that establishes a power efficient overlay for such ad-hoc networks, in which most devices can shut down their long range power hungry wireless interface (e.g., WiFi). Yet, the resulting overlay is fully connected, and for capacity and latency needs, no message ever travels more than 2k short range (e.g., BT) hops, where k is an arbitrary parameter. The paper describes the architecture of the solution and the management protocol, as well as a detailed simulations based performance study. The simulations largely validate the ability of the management infrastructure to obtain considerable power savings while keeping the network connected and maintaining reasonable latency. The performance study covers both static and mobile networks.