Managing Heterogeneous Wireless Environments via Hotspot Servers

Wireless communication today supports heterogeneous wireless devices with a number of different wireless network interfaces (WNICs). A large fraction of communication is infrastructure based, so the wireless access points and hotspot servers have become more ubiquitous. Battery lifetime is still a critical issue, with WNICs typically consuming a large fraction of the overall power budget in a mobile device. In this work we present a new technique for managing power consumption and QoS in diverse wireless environments using Hotspot servers. We introduce a resource manager module at both Hotspot server and the client. Resource manager schedules communication bursts between it and each client. The schedulers decide what WNIC to employ for communication, when to communicate data and how to minimize power dissipation while maintaining an acceptable QoS based on the application needs. We present two new scheduling policies derived from well known earliest deadline first (EDF) and rate monotonic (RM) [26] algorithms. The resource manager and the schedulers have been implemented in the HP’s Hotspot server [14]. Our measurement and simulation results show a significant improvement in power dissipation and QoS of Bluetooth and 802.11b for applications such as MP3, MPEG4, WWW, and email.