Energy-aware communication module selection through ZigBee paging for ubiquitous wearable computers with multiple radio interfaces

Ubiquious wearable computers (UWCs) with multiple radio interfaces such as WLAN, Bluetooth and ZigBee will play an important role in future ubiquitous network environments. UWCs with a conventional mechanism are assumed to maintain the power-on state of multiple communication modules to communicate with each other at any time. This 'alwayson' operation wastes the energy of UWCs and decreases the lifetime of UWCs. To reduce the energy consumption in UWCs, we propose an energy-aware communication module selection scheme through ZigBee paging in UWCs. The energy-aware communication module selection scheme predicts energy consumption for transmitting the given data and selects a communication module which consumes the minimum energy. A ZigBee paging mechanism is used to turn on or off the corresponding communication modules when they have data to send or no data to send, respectively. Experimental results show that the proposed energy-aware communication module selection scheme through ZigBee paging reduces energy consumption by 6%, 93%, and 97% for WLAN, Bluetooth, and ZigBee, respectively, compared with the conventional mechanism.