A listening power-saving Mechanism in MAC layer for the DCF of 802.11n

In this article, we propose a listening power-saving Mechanism (LPSM) which consists of an intelligent scheme for intelligent idle listening [16], a Network Allocation Vector (NAV) scheme to reduce the energy consumed in listening to the transmissions from other active stations, and a sleeping technique for an idle station to reduce the energy consumed in idle listening regardless of whether the station is busy or not. Our analysis and simulation results show that our schemes can reduce the total power consumption of a busy station by about 80% through shortening the time in listening to the idle channel and to the transmission of other busy stations effectively. In particular, energy consumption is significantly reduced when the number of active stations is very large. The power consumption for an idle station applying the sleeping technique in Listening Power-Saving Mechanism (LPSM) can be reduced by 33.7% if the maximal beacon interval is set to 320ms. An important characteristic of our scheme is that it is fully compatible with the legacy Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) and that there will be no throughput reduction if this power saving mechanism is applied to the DCF of 802.11.