Network-Aware Content Shaping for Energy Efficient Wireless Web Access

Abstract

Wireless web access is projected to be a primary driving application for the success of next generation wireless data services. However, enabling efficient wireless web access has several bottlenecks, including varying wireless channel conditions and limited battery capacity of handheld devices. In this chapter, we propose a framework to address these bottlenecks by shaping the content delivered to a handheld appropriately, depending on current network/channel conditions, in order to minimize energy consumption. A critical part of the framework is estimation of energy consumption by a handheld in accessing web content. To estimate energy consumption, we develop an energy model for wireless web access by PalmVII handheld, considering the effect of network-related parameters as well as application-level parameters. Next, we propose energy-conserving transformation techniques that change the organization of the information delivered to a handheld based on current network conditions. We demonstrate that significant energy savings can be achieved by the proposed network-aware content shaping techniques.