EDCA/CA: Enhancement of IEEE 802.11e EDCA by Contention Adaption for Energy Efficiency

This paper presents a contention adaptation (CA) mechanism to improve the energy efficiency in IEEE 802.11e EDCA. By suspending some transmissions, the proposed EDCA/CA can reduce the number of collisions. Because unnecessary retransmissions are eliminated, the energy consumption is reduced. Extensive simulations have been performed to demonstrate the performance of the proposed EDCA/CA. The results show that EDCA/CA can reduce the energy consumption significantly. It reduces frame delay as well when traffic load is heavy. When traffic load is light, the proposed EDCA/CA will slightly increase the video delay, which in general is still acceptable. Furthermore, the proposed EDCA/CA is simple and easy to implement. It is fully compatible with the 802.11e EDCA. It is both effective and practical.