Pointer controlled power saving medium access control protocol for IEEE 802.11 infrastructure networks

This work presents a new power saving medium access control protocol, pointer controlled slot allocation, and synchronisation protocol (PCSAR), for centralised control wireless networks. The proposed protocol was designed to operate within the IEEE 802.11 point coordination function (PCF). The steady state performance of PCSAR was compared with the standard PCF power saving mode, PCF-PS. The simulation results demonstrate a significant improvement in energy efficiency using the new protocol. For a wireless picocell consisting of an access point and 8 stations in power saving mode, the average energy saving with PCSAR is up to 38%, depending on the load. The results also show that PCSAR offers a significantly reduced uplink access delay over the PCF-PS while modestly improving both uplink and downlink throughput.