Energy-Efficient Mobile P2P Communications Based on Context Awareness

Mobile Peer-to-peer (P2P) realizes communications between mobile nodes without any access points. In general, Mobile P2P utilizes IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs. However, IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs do not support intelligent energy management schemes. Therefore, nodes should appropriately switch on and off its WLAN interface for reducing energy consumptions. In this paper, we propose energy efficient mobile P2P communications based on context information of users. We propose two models: Server-based model and Client-based model. In both models, nodes collect their context information such as location acquired by GPS. Server-based model uses a server to handle users' context information. In Server-based model, mobile nodes transmit the acquired context information to the server periodically. The server determines if the user should wake up or sleep, and transmits the decision to the user. Client-based model does not use any server. In Client-based model, each node decides to wake up or sleep by itself. We evaluate the performance of the proposed models via Nexus S smartphone. As results, we confirm that the proposed models can reduce energy consumption compared with the conventional IEEE 802.11 WLANs without energy management. In addition, we implement an audio streaming application using the proposed mobile P2P communications.