Poor wireless router configuration will consume Cell Phone Power

Poor wireless router configuration will consume Cell Phone Power

For most users, when the screen of a smartphone or tablet remains dark, you may think that they are all sleeping, and the power consumption should not be large, but in some environments, for example, if a wireless router is not configured at the time, there will still be a lot of information interaction operations in the background of these mobile terminals, and their limited power consumption will gradually be exhausted.

However, you may not know that this information interaction operation is produced by the router announcement (RA) message. What is the router announcement? How does it consume the power of mobile terminals such as mobile phones?

In the past, the router announcement was that, on the links and point-to-point links capable of multi-point transmission, Each router regularly sent a router announcement packet to the multi-point transmission group to announce its availability. In layman's terms, the router periodically advertises its existence and configured links and network parameters, or responds to the router request message.

The router notification mechanism is an invisible "killer" that consumes the power of smart phones and other mobile terminals"

After receiving these notifications, a smartphone, tablet, and other terminals have to process the notifications even if they are in a black screen to keep the network connection smooth.

Generally, vrouters frequently generate vro announcements so that the host can know whether the vro exists within a few minutes. However, generally, the frequency of notice on a vro is not high. Therefore, you cannot rely on the notice to detect the existence of a vro fault.

However, researchers from Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) recently discovered that if a router notification is sent too frequently, they will greatly shorten the battery power and life of mobile terminals.

For common mobile devices on the market, when the main processor is in sleep state, it will consume about 5 mA of the power. After receiving the RA packet, the packet will wake up the master processor to process the RA, and this process will consume 250 of the power in 200 mA milliseconds. Then, the main processor does not care about other unsolved tasks and returns to sleep state again. Therefore, on these devices, receiving an RA consumes approximately 0.014 mAh of power.

Of course, for laptops and desktop computers, the power seems to be nothing, but it is not easy for smart watches and smart phones with limited battery capacity. Taking Apple Watch as an example, its battery power is only 205 mAh, which can support responses from more than 14600 RA devices. Although it sounds like a lot, considering that some networks (routers) will be configured to send RA packets every few seconds, it cannot be ignored. (By default, Cisco routers send RA messages every 200 seconds .)

Therefore, it is necessary for the network administrator to adjust some improper router configurations to control the send frequency of RA messages to ensure that the power consumption of mobile devices in sleep mode is not too high. Generally, we recommend that you do not exceed 2% of the total battery capacity of the device. For example, try to reduce the power consumption of the received RA instance by less than 1mA, or send only about 7 RA messages per hour, so that the router can better serve the mobile devices connected to it.