Abstract : This article addresses the optimal choice of the waiting period (or timeout) that a device should respect before entering sleep mode, so as to optimize a tradeoff between power consumption and user impact. The optimal timeout is inferred by appropriate statistical modeling of the times between user requests. In a test approach, these times are supposed independent, and a constant optimal timeout is inferred accordingly. In a second approach, some dependency is introduced through a hidden Markov chain, which also models specific activity states, like business hours or night periods. This model leads to a statistical framework for computing adaptive optimal timeout values. Different strategies are assessed using real datasets, on the basis of the power consumption, user impact and the frequency of wrong decisions.
