Per-client basis approach for improving energy savings in multimedia wireless networks

The bottleneck of wireless enabled devices is the limited battery life. The main power consuming components of these devices are CPU, display and the network interface. In this paper, we propose and analyze a new mechanism for improving the energy savings of IEEE 802.11 based wireless network interfaces. The energy consumption of network interface is low when it is in idle state. We propose a mechanism in which we make the device idle for most of the time. We preprocess the multimedia stream to extract the useful information and this information is sent along with the stream. Instead of using a single static buffer, we propose a mechanism in which buffer is equally divided among the clients, based on the preprocessed information. Previously, with single static buffer, the client has to be active even though the packets are not destined to it. But in this approach, the client becomes active only when the packets are destined to it; rest of the time it remains in the idle state. This paper also considers cross traffic estimation using simple packet pair techniques. With this approach we can improve the energy savings of network interfaces with no quality degradation or packet loss.