Looking a little out of place among some of the more exotic and photogenic exhibits at Microsoft Research's 'Innovation Day' in Cambridge today was a distinctly DIY-looking collection of circuit boards and wires called Somniloquy. Named after the medical term for talking in your sleep, this interesting project could eventually be another important piece of the power management jigsaw.
Microsoft researcher James Scott explained that Somniloquy - which is really an external network adapter with added intelligence - allows your PC to go to sleep while still presenting an 'active' state to networked applications. At the moment, if you put your PC into S3 or hybrid sleep mode, the network card is normally turned off and so your PC can't be reached over the network.
With Somniloquy, a small amount of power (about 4-5 watts in the prototype we saw) is drawn via the USB bus to maintain network connectivity. Traffic is monitored and buffered, and if packets are received - for example, a remote desktop connection - that require the PC to be turned on, it's instantly woken from the sleep state.
It's very much a work in progress. According to Scott, work started in 2007 in collaboration with researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and a technical paper has just been published. The hardware is designed around a commercially-available GumStix ARM-powered computer-on-a-module costing around $200
Somniloquy performs its magic by buffering network traffic and data on an SD card - in effect, it masquerades as the PC when the PC goes tro sleep. Many simple tasks can be achieved by bypassing the PC's processor and using Somniloquy's low-power CPU instead, saving even more energy. For example, it could download files to the SD card and wake up the PC to transfer data when it's full, then put the PC to sleep again until another batch of data is ready.
It will be fascinating to see if this idea makes it out of the research labs: Wake-on-LAN is much less flexible and is a nightmare to implement. Somiloquy could certainly help cure your PC's sleepless nights.
