Energy-aware design for wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are the next step in the development of the wireless architecture, delivering wireless services for a large variety of users in personal, local, campus, and metropolitan areas. Energy efficiency solutions are becoming more vital for both local access networks and wireless networks and Green IT has attracted a considerable attention. However, the application of green network for wireless mesh networks has seldom been described in the literature. However, WMNs infrastructure devices are always active. Thus, during lower traffic periods the energy consumption is the same as in busy hours, while it would be possible to save a large amount of power. In this paper, we propose a novel green approach for power management in WMNs to enhance energy efficiency and network operation. The key objective of the proposed work is to optimize network energy consumption by putting under-utilized MRs to sleep state. To achieve this, we present a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP) model. We suggest Energy-Aware Design (EAD) to study the performance of WMN deployment scenario in Tlemcen city in Algeria over dynamic traffic profiles. The combination of the flexibility of WMN with Energy-Aware Design can efficiently reduce energy consumption in WMNs without significantly impacting the network performance.