There are many situations where power usage optimization is unnecessary. Optimization may not be necessary on devices that can run on a power feed over wired communications media, such as in Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) solutions. These devices may require a rudimentary level of power optimization techniques just to keep overall energy costs and aggregate power feed sizes at a reasonable level, but more extreme techniques necessary for battery-powered devices are not required. The situation is similar with devices that can easily be connected to mains power. Other types of devices may get an occasional charge of power from energy-harvesting techniques. For instance, some environmental sensors can run on solar cells. Typically, these devices still have to regulate their power usage in a strict manner -- for instance, to be able to use solar cells that are as small and inexpensive as possible.
In battery-operated devices, power usage is even more important. For instance, one of the authors employs over a hundred different sensor devices in their home network. A majority of these devices are wired and run on PoE, but in most environments this would be impractical because the necessary wires do not exist. The future is in wireless solutions that can cover buildings and other environments without assuming a pre-existing wired infrastructure. In addition, in many cases it is impractical to provide a mains power source. Often, there are no power sockets easily available in the locations that the devices need to be in, and even if there were, setting up the wires and power adapters would be more complicated than installing a standalone device without any wires.
Yet, with a large number of devices, the battery lifetimes become critical. Cost and practical limits dictate that devices can be largely just bought and left on their own. For instance, with a hundred devices, even a ten-year battery lifetime results in a monthly battery change for one device within the network. This may be impractical in many environments. In addition, some devices may be physically difficult to reach for a battery change. Or, a large group of devices -- such as utility meters or environmental sensors -- cannot be economically serviced too often, even if in theory the batteries could be changed.
Many of these situations lead to a requirement for minimizing power usage and/or maximizing battery lifetimes. Using the power usage strategies described in [
RFC 7228], mains-powered sensor-type devices can use the Always-on strategy, whereas battery-operated or energy-harvesting devices need to adjust behavior based on the communication interval. For intervals on the order of seconds, the Low-power strategy is appropriate. For intervals ranging from minutes to hours, either the Low-power or Normally-off strategy is suitable. Finally, for intervals lasting days or longer, Normally-off is usually the best choice. Unfortunately, much of our current technology has been built with different objectives in mind -- for instance, networked devices that are "always on", gadgets that require humans to recharge them every couple of days, and protocols that have been optimized to maximize throughput rather than conserve resources.
Long battery lifetimes are required for many applications, however. In some cases, these lifetimes should be on the order of years or even a decade or longer. Some communication devices already reach multi-year lifetimes, and continuous improvements in low-power electronics and advances in radio technology keep pushing these lifetimes longer. However, it is perhaps fair to say that battery lifetimes are generally too short at present.
Power usage cannot be evaluated based solely on lower-layer communications. The entire system, including upper-layer protocols and applications, is responsible for the power consumption as a whole. The lower communication layers have already adopted many techniques that can be used to reduce power usage, such as scheduling device wake-up times. Further reductions will likely need some cooperation from the upper layers so that unnecessary communications, denial-of-service attacks on power consumption, and other power drains are eliminated.
Of course, application requirements ultimately determine what kinds of communications are necessary. For instance, some applications require more data to be sent than others. The purpose of the guidelines in this memo is not to prefer one or the other application, but to provide guidance on how to minimize the amount of communications overhead that is not directly required by the application. While such optimization is generally useful, it is, relatively speaking, most noticeable in applications that transfer only a small amount of data or operate only infrequently.