Networking/Archive/Necko Idle State Design Draft

Purpose of This Page

While discussing features of FXOS v2.2 in the middle of 2014, one important topic is to optimize power consumption of FXOS smartphones. This brings out the concept of creating a whole new Idle State to Necko. Most discussions of it are recorded in Bugzilla. But there are also many offline discussions scattered in different places, or even only in engineers' minds.

The purpose of this Wiki page is to record, organize and conclude ideas around this topic so far. When we decide to re-initiate to implement this feature someday, we could quickly recap previous discussions here.

Concept of Necko Idle State

bug 1085760 (Provide a new "Idle" state for nsIIOService) was filed for the purpose of adding a new state idle to Necko component.
So far nsIIOService is ether online or offline, which is reported from its boolean attribute offline. When in offline mode, attempts to access network will fail. In order to allow applications be able to access network when necessary and meanwhile keep the lowest power consumption, we would like to add a third idle state, which is much like Windows dialer.
When a FXOS mobile device enters the sleep mode (such as the screen is off for 10 minutes), ...