Power Efficient Multipolling Mechanism for Next Generation Wireless LANs

As the wireless LAN (WLAN) becomes prevalent, users are demanding more and more features such as high throughput and low power consumption. To provide higher channel efficiency, contention-based multipolling mechanism was proposed to improve the single polling and contention-free multipolling mechanisms. However, when this medium access control (MAC) protocol is used, wireless stations would need to spend much time in overhearing which tends to waste energy and reduce battery lifetime. We propose a power efficient multipolling mechanism to arrange wireless stations into groups and put them into sleep mode when other stations are transmitting. From the simulation results, we find the proposed mechanism can address the issue of overhearing while also keeping the flexibility and high channel efficiency properties.