Towards energy-awareness in managing wireless LAN applications

We have investigated the scope for enabling WLAN applications to manage the trade-off between performance and energy usage. We have conducted measurements of energy usage and performance in our 802.11n WLAN testbed, which operates in the 5 GHz ISM band. We have defined an effective energy usage envelope with respect to application-level packet transmission, and we demonstrate how performance as well as the effective energy usage envelope is effected by various configurations of IEEE 802.11n, including transmission power levels and channel width. Our findings show that the packet size and packet rate of the application flow have the greatest impact on application-level energy usage, compared to transmission power and channel width. As well as testing across a range of packet sizes and packet rates, we emulate a Skype flow, a YouTube flow and file transfers (HTTP over Internet and local server) to place our results in context. Based on our measurements we discuss approaches and potential improvements of management in effective energy usage for the tested applications.