Exploring Adaptive Power Saving Schemes for Mobile VoIP Devices in IEEE 802.11 Networks

Current IEEE 802.11 power saving schemes provide limited savings for VoIP specific wireless traffic. This paper characterizes traffic from the two most popular VoIP service providers in the United States with hopes of developing an improved approach to save power. It proposes a novel scheme, named Adaptive Microsleep (AMS), as well as an alternative scheme named Non-Adaptive Microsleep (NAMS). Both AMS and NAMS are well suited for power saving on mobile VoIP devices by increasing the amount of time the devices spend in a low- power sleep state, but doing so without introducing additional delays that would noticeably deteriorate voice quality. Simulations show that both schemes successfully satisfy both of these primary goals, saving up to 83% power, while also meeting a secondary goal of not requiring large infrastructure changes to 802.11.