Channel utilization based energy efficient RoF Centralized Enterprise WLAN

Centralized Enterprise WLAN (CE-WLAN) encompassing supernumerary access points (APs) are being used to provide capacity to indoor environments. The approach of over dimensioned deployment of APs to meet the capacity needs of users at critical time periods are advocated with little concern towards the important issue of energy wastage. For a sustainable greener environment the issue of energy saving in such enterprise WLANs has to be integrated in our present day design. Hybrid fiber-wireless (Fi-Wi) LAN is envisioned as the evolution of CE-WLAN, which can help us enormously to reduce the energy wastage while meeting the demands of the indoor users. In this paper we analyze the energy wastage problem in indoor CE-WLAN. We then discuss the merits of implementing RoF based hybrid Fi-Wi LAN, and propose and compare channel utilization based resource on demand (RoD) strategy that could achieve energy saving gains.