Power management in IEEE 802.11 WLAN using proxy-assisted WLAN controller

Hand-held devices consume significant amount of energy while downloading large files or while streaming multimedia over a WLAN. IEEE 802.11 for WLANs provides PSM mechanism to reduce the energy consumption of a wireless device by allowing the wireless interface to go into sleep mode whenever possible. It is found that as stations (STAs) share the wireless channel at the packet level, wireless devices do not get enough opportunity to enter into the `doze´ state, making PSM ineffective. In this paper we present implementation and experimental evaluation of an energy saving scheme implemented over a home-grown centralised WLAN performance enhancing device, ADWISER, ([1], [2], [3]) assisted by a proxy server. Our implementation is based on the time slicing approach discussed in [4], [5].