So when your wifi device is looking for packets, that takes battery life, so why not sleep the device in congested areas. A Duke University graduate student has found a way to double the battery life of mobile devices – such as smartphones or laptop computers – by making changes to WiFi technology.
The energy drain is especially severe in the presence of other WiFi devices in the neighborhood. In such cases, each device has to “stay awake” before it gets its turn to download a small piece of the desired information. This means that the battery drainage in downloading a movie in Manhattan is far higher than downloading the same movie in a farmhouse in the Midwest.
The Duke-developed software eliminates this problem by allowing mobile devices to sleep while a neighboring device is downloading information. This not only saves energy for the sleeping device, but also for competing devices as well. it seems pretty logical that if there are network collisions going on out there in TCP land, buy letting them sleep, it could avoid draining the battery, by preventing the devices network stacks clashing.