Energy-efficient medium access control over IEEE 802.11 wireless heterogeneous networks

IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) [1] have been widely deployed in parallel with the growth of mobile devices. However, there is a bottleneck that limits the communication time of these devices. Mobile devices heavily depend on the energy provided by their batteries, and hence their running time is limited. In this paper1, we propose an energy-efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) scheme for wireless LAN environment where mobile stations has different amount of traffic flow and various traffic types, such as TCP and UDP. Energy saving in wireless network is achieved by maintaining mobile stations in the doze state as much as possible, without degrading the expected throughput. In the proposed scheme, each station only makes use of its local information and does not cause any overhead on the network. Therefore, the proposed scheme can be easily implemented without any changes on the current IEEE 802.11 standard. Stations performing the proposed scheme can fairly coexist with other stations implemented with the standard DCF protocol in the network. Extensive simulations have been performed to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach. The results illustrate that the proposed scheme is very efficient and reduces the energy consumption of mobile stations that have different amount of traffic flow and various traffic types.