An energy-aware transmission mechanism for wifi-based mobile devices handling upload TCP traffic

This paper presents an energy-aware transmission mechanism that improves the throughput and reduces the energy consumption of mobile devices in wired-cum-wireless TCP networks. The proposed mechanism places an agent at the base station, which identifies the cause of packet losses in the underlying network. When the mobile device acts as a TCP source, it adjusts the size of the congestion window adaptively according to the cause of packet losses with the aids of the agent in order to improve the transmission performance. In addition, the proposed mechanism lets the communication device to stay in sleep mode after completing the transmission in order to reduce the energy consumption. As a result, the cooperation between the mobile device and the agent improves the transmission performance as well as the energy efficiency greatly. To evaluate the performance of the proposed mechanism, we analyzed the effect of TCP on the communication device for mobile devices and present a power model. With extensive simulations based on the power model, we demonstrate that the proposed mechanism significantly improves the transmission performance, and reduces the energy consumption over a wide range of both wired and wireless packet losses.