SleepWell forces WiFi to wait its turn, keeps gadgets well-rested

Ever feel like your WiFi devices’ battery-lives are better off when not surrounded by peers and passersby? According to Duke University grad student Justin Manweiler and assistant professor Romit Roy Choudhury, this phenomenon is due to gadgets constantly fighting to retrieve the same data. Their Systems Networking Research Group has created a program dubbed SleepWell to alleviate the congestion; it puts WiFi to rest until the path is clear for accessing the specific data it needs, and provides improved power management all the while. The tech was shown off at MobiSys 2011 this past week and reportedly works well “across a number of device types and situations.” Notably, Microsoft and Nokia (amongst others like Verizon) are backing up the project, which makes us cautiously optimistic that it could be headed for WP7 (or Windows 8, for that matter) in due time. There’s no info on whether SleepWell will ever be distributed commercially, but may we suggest an LTE version to help out big V’s poor ol’ T-Bolt ? SleepWell forces WiFi to wait its turn, keeps gadgets well-rested originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 04 Jul 2011 08:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink

Posted by on July 4, 2011. Filed under News, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.