On the energy efficiency of opportunistic access in wireless home networks

In this paper, we evaluate the energy efficiency of opportunistic channel access when used in wireless home networking applications. The main idea is to prioritize the access rights of the wireless home applications sharing a given IEEE 802.11 channel. A low priority network can opportunistically access the channel during the inactive periods of a high priority network. We empirically show that such opportunistic access does not only improve the channel utilization but also reduces the energy consumption by up to 25% and 40% compared to legacy IEEE 802.11 channel access that is widely adopted in wireless home networks. Our results also show that opportunistic access provides protection to the access right of the high priority network with outages as low as 6.4% to 0.5%.