Efficient power management for infrastructure-based IEEE 802.11 WLANs

Abstract

Almost all mobile devices nowadays are enabled with IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN), which is also known as WiFi. One of the most important considerations when choosing an 802.11 device is its battery life. To allow mobile devices to conserve energy, IEEE 802.11 standard specifies a power save mode (PSM). A station/device in PSM, i.e. PSM-STA, will wake up at a predefined listen interval (LI) to receive frames buffered at the access point (AP) while it is sleeping. In this thesis, we focus on enhancing the basic PSM mechanisms in the standard. In particular, two new power saving schemes, delayed wakeup and dynamic listen interval, are proposed. Unlike many existing schemes, our schemes are fully standard compliant, and legacy devices can support them via a firmware upgrade.

In our delayed wakeup (DW) scheme, we assume that all PSM-STAs use the same listen interval of one. That is all PSM-STAs wake up at every beacon frame broadcast, or beacon interval (BI). From the traffic indication map (TIM) in the beacon, a PSMSTA learns if there are any buffered frames at AP. If yes, it will stay awake until all buffered frames are retrieved. This creates a rush hour on the shared channel right after a beacon broadcast. If the channel is congested, having all PSM-STAs staying awake will not improve the system delay performance but consume more power. Aiming at saving battery power while not affecting delay-throughput performance, our DWscheme divides a BI into n sub-BIs. Then based on the amount of buffered frames, AP identifies and instructs “excess” stations to sleep immediately and wake up at a non-congested sub-BI later on. “Instructions” are judiciously encoded inside the modified TIM. We show that our modifications are fully transparent to legacy stations. In order to more accurately identify the amount of excess stations, an analytical model is also constructed to derive the saturated throughput of a WLAN consisting of PSM-STAs.

In our dynamic listen interval (DLI) scheme, we aim at minimizing unnecessary wakeups while without sacrificing delay performance. Note that when a PSM-STA wakes up to receive a beacon and found that there are no buffered frames at AP, the PSM-STA experiences an unnecessary wakeup. Accordingly, the associated mode transition energy is wasted. According to the IEEE 802.11 standard, each STA chooses its fixed LI at the time of association. If LI=1, a STA wakes up at every beacon interval (as that in DW scheme). Although packet delay is minimized in this case, the chance of unnecessary wakeups can be high. On the other hand, a larger LI can reduce the chance of unnecessary wakeups but the delay will be increased. Our DLI scheme addresses this problem by dynamically adjusting the LI value according to traffic load. Specifically, each unnecessary wakeup will increase a STA’s LI by one, and a necessary wakeup will immediately reset LI to one. Simulations show that when traffic is bursty, mode transition energy consumption can be reduced without noticeable degradation in delay performance.