Abstract
This paper addresses the issue of battery power conservation in wireless personal area networks (WPANs). Specifically, we consider a WPAN, which contains a processor and a disk drive, and develop a collaborative power management technique, which minimizes the total WPAN power consumption. Our approach is based on the theory of rational behavior, which leads to a collaborative architecture where devices in the WPAN are equipped with cooperating rational controllers (RCs). Using, as an example, the Intel 80200 XScale processor and the Hitachi 1 GB microdrive, we show that collaborative power management using RCs offers substantial power saving compared to selfish operation, where each device attempts to minimize only its own power consumption.