Meru Technical Note - How to extend the battery life on a mobile device
What can I do to extend the battery life on a mobile device?
Scope
KB ARTICLE TYPE: Troubleshooting
KEYWORDS: battery life, WiFi, DTIMSolution
It is possible to extend the battery life of such devices as wireless hand held scanner and WiFi Phones by not waking them up too often.
You can do this by adjusting the DTIM (Delivery Traffic Indication Message) interval. DTIM will be sent out with beacons at the specified interval, if set to 1 the AP tells the clients that has gone into sleep mode that it has to wake up and be ready to receive data, if set to 5, the client will only wake up and on every 5th beacon. The more time the clients has to wake up the more battery the client uses.
The following DTIM setting has yielded good results for some of our customer:
Ascom: DTIM = 5
SpectraLink: DTIM = 2
Alternate DTIM settings will effect different devices accordingly. Please check your your device spec sheet for optimal setting for you particular device.
