Improving battery performance by using traffic shaping techniques

We present a new approach to minimizing energy consumption by addressing battery management techniques that exploit the charge recovery effect inherent to many secondary storage batteries. We review results that pertain to the capacity of a battery and its dependence on the intensity of the discharge current. The phenomenon of charge recovery that takes place under bursty or pulsed discharge conditions is identified as a mechanism that can be exploited to enhance the capacity of a battery. The bursty nature of many data traffic sources suggests that data transmissions may provide natural opportunities for charge recovery. We explore stochastic models to track charge recovery in conjunction with bursty discharge processes. Using the postulated model, we identify the improvement to battery capacity that results from a pulsed discharge driven by bursty stochastic discharge demand. The insight from this analysis leads us to propose discharge shaping techniques that trade-off energy efficiency with delay.