Energy saving through intelligent coordination among daily used fixed and mobile devices

Abstract

Network end-user devices such as laptops and desktop PCs are often left powered ON 24/7 while they remain idle most of the time. The main reason behind this is maintaining network connectivity for remote access, VoIP, instant messaging and other Internet-based applications. The Network Connectivity Proxy (NCP) emerged as a quite promising strategy for significantly reducing network energy waste by allowing devices to sleep without losing their presence over Internet. It impersonates presence of devices during their sleeping periods at all layers of TCP/IP stack. The NCP can successfully proxy basic networking protocols (e.g., ARP, PING, DHCP etc) but faces challenges in proxying TCP sessions and proprietary closed-source applications with encrypted packets.To overcome the limitations of NCP concept, this paper proposes a new strategy for reducing network energy waste through intelligent coordination among a user's devices (e.g., smartphone, laptop, desktop PC etc). In the proposed system, a user's daily used devices autonomously and seamlessly communicate with a centralized control server that decides which user device will maintain presence of applications at a given instant. To allow devices to sleep and wake them up whenever necessary, the proposed system also uses a light-weight Home Gateway Proxy (HGP) with very basic set of practically realizable features. The communication framework for HGP is designed to achieve autodiscovery, seamless networking and communication features. This paper also practically evaluates the proposed system and estimates energy saving for fixed as well as mobile network devices.

What is a smart device? - a conceptualisation within the paradigm of the internet of things

“…Lo, Yu and Tseng (2014) used the term smart device, whereas İlhan, Yıldız, & Kayrak (2016) used the term smart mobile device. The term mobile devices is also used by some authors, such as Lau, et al (2017), Khan & Khan (2017) and Furthmüller & Waldhorst (2012). Azhar & Cox (2015) uses the terms "mobile tools", "mobile technologies" and "mobile devices" for devices that allow workers to get instant access to project documents, plans and specifications.…”