Energy Consumption in Wireless Networks with Services Differentiation: Implementation and Simulation

IEEE 802.11e has been approved for wireless local area networks (WLAN) to satisfy quality of services (QoS) requirements of delay-sensitive applications. This standard is based on services differentiation. However, energy consumption in WLAN is always a challenge. Unfortunately, there were no researches studying energy optimization coupled with QoS. So, in this paper, we propose a linear energy consumption model describing all energy contributions in IEEE 802.11e networks. Therefore, we evaluate the maximum number of packets that one terminal can transmit competing in a cluster of n nodes. Our model implementation was a subject of validation by simulations via the network simulator tool, ns-2. Through our study, we demonstrate that IEEE 802.11e is insufficient to apply services differentiation with good performance.