A fundamental vision driving pervasive computing research is access to personal and shared data anywhere at anytime. In many ways, this vision is close to being realized. Wireless networks such as 802.11 offer connectivity to small, mobile devices. Portable storage, such as mobile disks and USB keychains, let users carry several gigabytes of data in their pockets. Yet, at least three substantial barriers to pervasive data access remain. First, power-hungry network and storage devices tax the limited battery capacity of mobile computers. Second, the danger of viewing stale data or making inconsistent updates grows as objects are replicated across more computers and portable storage devices. Third, mobile data access performance can suffer due to variable storage access times caused by dynamic power management, mobility, and use of heterogeneous storage devices. To overcome these barriers, we have built a new distributed file system called BlueFS. Compared to the Coda file system, BlueFS reduces file system energy usage by up to 55% and provides up to 3 times faster access to data replicated on portable storage. 1

Maintaining optimal consistency in a distributed system requires that nodes be always-on to synchronize information. Unfortunately, mobile devices such as laptops do not have adequate battery capacity for constant processing and communication. Even by powering off unnecessary components, such as the screen and disk, current laptops only have a lifetime of a few hours. Although PDAs and sensors are similarly limited in lifetime, a PDA’s power requirement is an order-of-magnitude smaller than a laptop’s, and a sensor’s is an order-of-magnitude smaller than a PDA’s. By combining these diverse platforms into a single integrated laptop, we can reduce the power cost of always-on operation. This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of Turducken, a Hierarchical Power Management architecture for mobile systems. We focus on a particular instantiation of HPM, which provides high levels of consistency in a laptop by integrating two additional low power processors. We demonstrate that a Turducken system can provide battery lifetimes of up to ten times that of a standard laptop for always-on operation and three times for a system that periodically sleeps. I.

Abstract—Disruption Tolerant Networks rely on intermittent contacts between mobile nodes to deliver packets using storecarry-and-forward paradigm. The key to improving performance in DTNs is to engineer a greater number of transfer opportunities. We earlier proposed the use of throwbox nodes, which are stationary, battery powered nodes with storage and processing, to enhance the capacity of DTNs. However, the use of throwboxes without efficient power management is minimally effective. If the nodes are too liberal with their energy consumption, they will fail prematurely. However if they are too conservative, they may miss important transfer opportunities, hence increasing lifetime without improving performance. In this paper, we present a hardware and software architecture for energy efficient throwboxes in DTNs. We propose a hardware platform that uses a multi-tiered, multi-radio, scalable, solar powered platform. The throwbox employs an approximate heuristic for solving the NP-Hard problem of meeting an average power constraint while maximizing the number of bytes forwarded by it. We built and deployed prototype throwboxes in UMassDieselNet – a bus DTN testbed. Through extensive trace-driven simulations and prototype deployment we show that a single throwbox with a 270 cm 2 solar panel can run perpetually while improving packet delivery by 37 % and reducing message delivery latency by at least 10 % in the network.

As mobile devices continue to shrink, users are no longer merely nomads, but truly mobile, employing devices on the move. At the same time, these users no longer rely on a single managed network, but exploit a wide variety of connectivity options as they spend their day. Together, these trends argue that systems must consider the derivative of connectivity— the changes inherent in movement between separately managed networks, with widely varying capabilities. To manage the derivative of connectivity, we exploit the fact that people are creatures of habit; they take similar paths every day. Our system, BreadCrumbs, tracks the movement of the device’s owner, and customizes a predictive mobility model for that specific user. Rather than rely on a synthetic model or aggregate observations, this custom-tailored model can be used together with past observations of wireless network capabilities to generate connectivity forecasts. Applications can in turn use these forecasts to plan future network use with confidence. We have built a BreadCrumbs prototype, and evaluated it with several weeks of real-world usage. Our results show that these forecasts are sufficiently accurate, even with as little as one week of training, to provide improved performance with reduced power consumption for several applications. 1

IP based telephony is rapidly gaining acceptance over traditional means of voice communication. Wireless LANs are also becoming ubiquitous due to their inherent ease of deployment and decreasing costs. In enterprise Wi-Fi environments, VoIP is a compelling application for devices such as smartphones with multiple wireless interfaces. However, the high energy consumption of Wi-Fi interfaces, especially when a device is idle, presents a significant barrier to the widespread adoption of VoIP over Wi-Fi. To address this issue, we present Cell2Notify, a practical and deployable energy management architecture that leverages the cellular radio on a smartphone to implement wakeup for the high-energy consumption Wi-Fi radio. We present detailed measurements of energy consumption on smartphone devices, and we show that Cell2Notify can extend the battery lifetime of VoIP over Wi-Fi enabled smartphones by a factor of 1.7 to 6.4.

A key goal of mobile computing is untethering devices from wires, making them truly portable. While mobile devices can make use of wireless communication for network connectivity, they are still dependent on an electrical connection for continued operation. This need for tethering to available electricity significantly limits their range, usefulness, and manageability. Environmental energy harvesting—collecting energy from the sun, wind, heat differentials, and motion—offers the prospect of unprecedented, large-scale deployments of perpetual mobile systems that never need to be recharged. However, programming these systems presents new challenges: perpetual systems must adapt dynamically to available energy, delivering higher service levels when energy is plentiful, while consuming less energy when energy is scarce. This paper presents eFlux, a high-level energy-aware programming language and associated runtime system that specifically targets perpetual mobile systems. eFlux programmers build programs from components written in C or NesC and label flows through the program with different energy-states. The deployed program then adapts to current energy levels by changing energy states, turning flows on and off and adjusting their rates. We demonstrate eFlux’s utility and portability with two perpetual applications deployed on widely different hardware platforms: a solar-powered web server for remote, ad-hoc deployments, and a GPS-based location tracking sensor that we have deployed on a threatened species of turtle as well as on automobiles. 1

In distributed systems, transcoding techniques have been used to customize multimedia objects, utilizing trade-offs between the quality and sizes of these objects to provide differentiated services to clients. Our research uses transcoding techniques in wireless systems to customize video streams to the requirements of users, while minimizing the energy costs. We introduce an approach to dynamically determine which transcoders to execute and where to execute them (e.g., client or server). The goal is to select appropriate transcoders (a) to provide clients with the quality of service they desire while (b) minimizing the energy consumption of the end-hosts in accordance with application-specific global energy management directives. This paper investigates sample transcoder functions for video streaming on handheld devices and introduces a mechanism for selecting the most appropriate transcoders and transcoder parameters.

The relative power consumed in the WLAN interface of a mobile device is rising due to significant improvements in the energy efficiency of the other device components. The unpredictability of the incoming WLAN traffic limits the effectiveness of existing power saving techniques. This paper introduces a Power Aware Web Proxy (PAWP) architecture designed to schedule incoming web traffic into intervals of high and no communication. This traffic pattern allows WLAN interfaces to switch to a low power state after very short idle intervals. PAWP uses a collection of HTTP-level techniques to compensate any negative impact that traffic scheduling may have. PAWP does not require any client or web server modifications. In this paper, we describe our initial experiences with a PAWP implementation for 802.11b WLANs. Our experiments show savings of more than 50 % in the energy consumed by the WLAN interface. Finally, our experiences give us insights into possible browser improvements when power consumption is taken into account.

In mobile devices, the wireless network interface card (WNIC) consumes a significant portion of overall system energy. One way to reduce energy consumed by a mobile device is to transition its WNIC to a lower-power sleep mode when data is not being received or transmitted. This paper investigates client-centered techniques for trading download time for energy savings during TCP downloads, in an attempt to reduce the energy*delay product. Effectively saving WNIC energy during a TCP download is difficult because TCP streams tend to be smooth, leaving little potential sleep time. The basic idea behind our technique is that the client increases the amount of time that can be spent in sleep mode by shaping the traffic. In particular, the client convinces the server to send data in predictable bursts, trading lower WNIC energy cost for increased transmission time. Our technique does not rely on any assistance from the server, a proxy, or IEEE 802.11b power-saving mode. Results show that in Internet experiments our scheme outperforms baseline TCP by 64 % in the best case, with an average improvement of 19%. 1

Abstract — While the 802.11 power saving mode (PSM) and its enhancements can reduce power consumption by putting the wireless network interface (WNI) into sleep as much as possible, they either require additional infrastructure support, or may degrade the transmission throughput and cause additional transmission delay. These schemes are not suitable for long and bulk data transmissions with strict QoS requirements on wireless devices. With increasingly abundant bandwidth available on the Internet, we have observed that TCP congestion control is often not a constraint of bulk data transmissions as bandwidth throttling is widely used in practice. In this paper, instead of further manipulating the trade-off between the power saving and the incurred delay, we effectively explore the power saving potential by considering the bandwidth throttling on streaming/downloading servers. We propose an application-independent protocol, called PSM-throttling. With a quick detection on the TCP flow throughput, a client can identify bandwidth throttling connections with a low cost. Since the throttling enables us to reshape the TCP traffic into periodic bursts with the same average throughput as the server transmission rate, the client can accurately predict the arriving time of packets and turn on/off the WNI accordingly. PSM-throttling can minimize power consumption on TCP-based bulk traffic by effectively utilizing available Internet bandwidth without degrading the application’s performance perceived by the user. Furthermore, PSM-throttling is client-centric, and does not need any additional infrastructure support. Our lab-environment and Internet-based evaluation results show that PSM-throttling can effectively improve energy savings (by up to 75%) and/or the QoS for a broad types of TCP-based applications, including streaming, pseudo streaming, and large file downloading, over existing PSMlike methods. I.