Saving Energy in Mobile Devices with WLAN and Bluetooth Interfaces using Cooperative Clustering Network

Mobile devices are mostly battery driven and the improvement of battery capacity is quite moderate if compared to the dramatically increase of the complexity of the terminals. Therefore energy consumption represents a bottleneck for the evolution of such devices and it needs to be reduced. About 70 percent of smart phones in the market have a Bluetooth interface as a secondary radio for personal area networking. The Bluetooth standard is primarily designed for low-power consumption, requiring only about a 10th of the WLAN power. However, because of its limited power, Bluetooth supports a low bandwidth of only 2 Mbps with a short range of 10 meters. In this work, we explore the idea of using this coexistence of high-power/high-bandwidth WLAN and low-power/low-bandwidth bluetooth in a single mobile platform to solve the power consumption problem in WLAN-based communication systems. This is based on clustering. Cluster is a Bluetooth Personal Area Network (PAN), which consists of one cluster head and several regular nodes. The Cooperative Networking protocol (CONET), which dynamically reforms clusters according to each node‟s bandwidth requirement, energy use, and application type. CONET does not require modifications of existing wireless infrastructures because clustering is performed independently of WLAN access points. Our work is extended to multi hop clustering.