Systematic Exploration of Power-Aware Scenarios for IEEE 802.11ac WLAN Systems

This work explores the power management options for a transmitting wireless system using system scenarios. We exploit the variations in the communication channel and the protocol requirements during the lifetime of a transmission, in order to optimize energy usage. Both the transmission signal power and the memory subsystem are taken into consideration. Different system scenarios and the corresponding configurations capture the different resource requirements, which change dynamically during transmission. Signal power on the antenna and active memory banks are the two main platform parameters explored in this study and sufficiently detailed system models are presented for both. The trade-off between the accuracy of the generated system scenarios and the switching cost between them is analyzed. The exploration is performed for an increasing number of system scenarios, from 1 to 14, and the reported power gains are over 95% and over 25% on the signal power and the memory subsystems respectively.