One of the problems for the great mobile revolution and ubiquitous computing has been battery life. A smartphone struggles to make it through just one day and the introduction of even more powerful processors may make life worse.
So a clever invention by a graduate student that could double the batter life of a smartphone sounds like a winner. Scientific American reports on the invention by a Duke University researcher, Justin Manweiler, a computer science graduate student at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering.
Mobile devices today waste a lot of energy searching for a WiFi signal and then staying connected while overtaxed wireless networks ferry data to and from them. SleepWell allows a mobile device to slip into power-saving mode while it is waiting its turn to connect. This is no small matter, particularly when scores of caffeine-craving technophiles gather at the local Starbucks to take advantage of the free wireless access. Manweiler likens the competition for WiFi to big-city traffic. When workers leave their offices en masse at the end of the day, they clog up the roads and rail lines. If these workers staggered the times they left, the transit systems would be less crowded, and it would take less time to get home. Similarly, if mobile devices took their turn accessing WiFi access points, data would move faster and these devices would use less energy.
SleepWell is installed on the devices that create a WiFi network infrastructure, including WiFi routers and access points. As such, it is designed so that any mobile device—whether it uses Apple OS X, Google Android, Windows or some other platform—can take advantage of it.
The sleep periods differ from sleep mode on most laptops that kick in after a few minutes. SleepWell enables is more like power-napping, short sleep periods many times a second.
In trials, reports the magazine, battery life was in some cases doubled.
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