Performance Analysis of Energy Consumption of Smartphone Running Mobile Hotspot Application

Recently, smartphones are widely used due to the popularity of Internet, and they are equipped with both Wi-Fi and cellular radio interfaces generally. In smartphone, although Wi-Fi interface is generally used for supporting higher rate data session of the smartphone itself, it can be also used to support connectivity to other nearby wireless devices with Wi-Fi interface only, such as laptop. This is achieved by mobile hotspot application of smartphones, where smartphone acts as an access point (AP) for nearby wireless devices using Wi-Fi interface. By using the Wi-Fi interface, nearby wireless devices transmit data to smartphone, and smartphone uses its cellular interface to deliver the data to wireless network. However, data transmission of nearby wireless devices using mobile hotspot application consumes significant battery energy of smartphone since Wi-Fi interface of the smartphone should be awaken always and data session of nearby wireless devices should be processed with both Wi-Fi and cellular interfaces of smartphone. In this paper, we develop an analytical model of energy consumption of smartphone running mobile hotspot application and analyze the effect of various parameters on the energy consumption of smartphone. The result of this work can be used to propose an enhanced mobile hotspot scheme by giving insight on the energy consumption.