The Wi-Fi Alliance trade group this week launched a program to decrease Wi-Fi power requirements in an attempt to encourage use of the technology in cell phones and other mobile devices.
The company said it will certify an extension to its existing Wi-Fi Multimedia (WMM) program called WMM Power Save. WMM was adopted more than a year ago to help with the development of applications such as streaming media and voice-over-IP transmitted via Wi-Fi networks.
The WMM Power Save extension is aimed at device vendors and provides a framework to tweak power consumption when Wi-Fi is used. That, in turn, will make Wi-Fi more attractive for small devices such as cell phone. Wi-Fi is starting to appear in some devices and will eventually enable users to, for example, seamlessly switch between cellular and voice-over-WLAN calls.
“WMM Power Save has the potential to provide significant improvement in battery life for devices such as mobile handsets,” Wi-Fi Alliance managing director Frank Hanzlik said in a statement.
