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Saving Energy during Channel Contention in 802.11 WLANs

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Abstract

We focus on energy saving in 802.11-based WLANs. Previous work has shown that, on the one hand, 802.11 wireless interfaces consume a significant amount of energy, on the other hand the use of current power management schemes can severely degrade the QoS performance of several Internet-based applications. Furthermore, the energy spent by wireless devices may even increase when the standard 802.11 power-saving mode (PSM) is implemented. These facts suggest that other solutions to energy saving are highly needed.

In this paper, we consider the 802.11 distributed access scheme and we propose a novel approach that enables a station to enter a low-power operational state during channel contention. More specifically, our technique exploits the virtual carrier sense mechanism and the backoff function specified in the IEEE 802.11 DCF, so that a station can dramatically reduce its energy consumption without significant degradation of the QoS performance. To efficiently implement our mechanism, a low-power state with negligible transition time into the active state must be identified. This can be any of the non-standard, low-power states defined by proprietary solutions in the current or next-generation products [7,15,22]. By using the network simulator ns2, we evaluate the performance improvement that is obtained when the proposed mechanism is implemented, against the results attained through the standard DCF. The results show that we can achieve a reduction in energy consumption as large as 80% and 28% under, respectively, UDP and TCP traffic.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CERCOM—Dipartimento di Elettronica, Politecnico di Torino Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, Torino, 10139, Italy

    V. Baiamonte & C.-F. Chiasserini

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  1. V. Baiamonte
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  2. C.-F. Chiasserini
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Correspondence to V. Baiamonte.

Additional information

This work was supported by the Italian Ministry of University and Research through the PATTERN and the PRIMO projects.

Valeria Baiamonte graduated from Politecnico di Torino with a degree in Telecommunications Engineering in 2002, with 110/110. Between March 2002 and November 2002, she was supported by TiLab (Italian Public Telephone Research Company) while developing her thesis work on packet scheduling algorithms for WCDMA systems networks. From January 2003 to December 2003, she was a CNIT researcher at the Electronics Department of Politecnico working on the VICOM project. Currently she is a PhD student at the Electronics Department of Politecnico di Torino.

Carla-Fabiana Chiasserini graduated with a summa cum laude degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Florence in 1996. She did her graduate work at the Politecnico di Torino, Italy, receiving the Ph.D. degree in 1999. Since then she has been with the department of Electrical Engineering at Politecnico di Torino, where she is currently an assistant professor. Since 1999, she has worked as a visiting researcher at the University of California, San Diego, California. Her research interests include architectures, protocols and performance analysis of wireless networks for integrated multi-media services. She is a member of the editorial board of the Ad Hoc Networks Journal (Elsevier), and has served as an associate editor of the IEEE Communications Letters since 2004.

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Baiamonte, V., Chiasserini, CF. Saving Energy during Channel Contention in 802.11 WLANs. Mobile Netw Appl 11, 287–296 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-006-4480-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-006-4480-x

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