Energy-efficientwireless resource sharing for federated residential networks

The proliferation of overlapping, always-on IEEE 802.11 Access Points (APs) in urban areas can cause inefficient bandwidth usage and energy waste. Cooperation among federated APs could address these problems (i) by allowing under-used devices to hand over their wireless stations to nearby APs and temporarily switch off, (ii) by balancing the load of stations among APs and thus offloading congested APs. We outline a framework that allows such cooperation, yielding a 60% energy saving in realistic residential settings, while providing load balancing and meeting the user expectations in terms of throughput.