M-PSM: Mobility-Aware Power Save Mode for IEEE 802.11 WLANs

With the proliferation of Wi-Fi equipped mobile devices such as smart phones, it becomes even more important to design and implement effective power management schemes for Wi-Fi interfaces so that the battery lifetime can be prolonged. In this paper, we propose an enhancement to the default 802.11 Power Save Mode (PSM), called M-PSM, which exploits additional power-saving opportunities by considering user mobility and detailed traffic condition when making the sleep/wakeup schedules for Wi-Fi interfaces. We have implemented M-PSM in the Madwifi device driver and demonstrated its effectiveness via experiments and trace-based simulations.