Energy-aware adaptive compression for mobile-to-mobile communications

Abstract

A single bit transmission over the wireless card can consume 1000 times more energy as compared to a 32-bit CPU computation. This fact is very critical for devices operating on limited battery such as mobile devices. In this work, we propose a new approach that utilizes a lightweight compression scheme for the to-be-transmitted data in an adaptive manner. In our approach, the signal strength is being monitored during the transmission process and blocks of data are compressed on-the- fly only when energy gain is promised. This paper explains the proposed adaptive approach and presents energy measurement results that show significant gains in energy as compared to the always-compress or no-compress schemes.