A Detailed Look into Power Consumption of Commodity 60 GHz Devices

Abstract

The millimeter-wave technology is emerging as an alternative to legacy 2.4/5 GHz WiFi, offering multi-Gigabit throughput. While a lot of attention has been paid recently to analyzing the performance of the 60 GHz technology and adapting it for indoor WLAN usage, the power consumption aspect has largely been neglected. Given that mobile devices are the next target for 60 GHz, any discussion about this technology is incomplete without considering power consumption. In this work, we present the first, to our best knowledge, detailed study of the power consumption of 60 GHz commodity devices. We evaluate the power and energy consumption of two standard-compliant 60 GHz wireless adapters in different operating states and under a number of different configurations. We also compare our results against 802.11ac and discuss power-performance tradeoffs for the two technologies.