Should we be designing our latest and most advanced cellular network technologies to accommodate inadequate battery technology in today’s devices? It’s been supposed that the fact that smartphones today enter “idle” mode when a data transmission to the mobile device ceases for a few seconds. This repeated disconnect and connect of a data session is purported to save battery life while adding a significant amount of signaling to the LTE network.
If we assume this is true, should we not also assume that battery technology will continue at a rapid pace, as it has for the past 15 years? Shouldn’t we assume that mobile standby time, talk time and data connection time will continually increase with ever smaller batteries on a single charge for the next several years? Mobile phone battery life has been extended to about five times of what used to be available in 1995 and is anticipated to continue to grow by 30% to 40% over the next few years.
It seems to me that either the mobile phones of the near future will not need to enter an idle mode to save battery power, or we will need to engineer the new LTE networks to account for as much as a 12% increase in signaling traffic due to constant and repeated connects and disconnects by the device. Since when has the engineering of network capacity and performance been so dependent on the inadequacies of a mobile device’s battery? Should we truly be accounting for this?
Randy Snyder
Wireless Cellular Telecommunications Consulting
Wireless Research Services, LLC
Mobile: +1 (702) 521-7900
Email: rsnyder@wrsvs.com
Skype: randallsnyder
http://www.wrsvs.com
If we assume this is true, should we not also assume that battery technology will continue at a rapid pace, as it has for the past 15 years? Shouldn’t we assume that mobile standby time, talk time and data connection time will continually increase with ever smaller batteries on a single charge for the next several years? Mobile phone battery life has been extended to about five times of what used to be available in 1995 and is anticipated to continue to grow by 30% to 40% over the next few years.
It seems to me that either the mobile phones of the near future will not need to enter an idle mode to save battery power, or we will need to engineer the new LTE networks to account for as much as a 12% increase in signaling traffic due to constant and repeated connects and disconnects by the device. Since when has the engineering of network capacity and performance been so dependent on the inadequacies of a mobile device’s battery? Should we truly be accounting for this?
Randy Snyder
Wireless Cellular Telecommunications Consulting
Wireless Research Services, LLC
Mobile: +1 (702) 521-7900
Email: rsnyder@wrsvs.com
Skype: randallsnyder
http://www.wrsvs.com
Due to limits in energy density and limitations of current battery technologies I believe that battery capacities will be growing very slowly until new technology will appear (if at all).
ReplyDeleteTherefore power optimizations of phones and features like fast dormancy are a must. Network has infinite power capacity as compared to the phone thus all the additional load has to be put on the network side.
Also, I wouldn't blame "inadequacies" of the battery. Material's Science engineers and researches are doing their best to improve batteries capacity but as mentioned above this technology is pretty old and based on chemical potential difference and we cannot expect incredible improvement of this technology even with enormous budgets that are spend on R&D.
At the moment phone manufacturers are directing enormous resources to optimize SW and HW for better power efficience and it is now one of the main headaches of the main benchmarks in the industry. Together with bigger screens, faster application and graphic processors phones need to optimize sleep and inactive power consumption as much as possible.