Energy Efficient H.263 Video Transmission in Power Saving Wireless LAN Infrastructure

Wireless local area networks (WLANs) are now being used in places where access point (AP) power saving would be very desirable. Although this is not currently possible, modifications to the IEEE 802.11 protocol have recently been proposed which would permit this functionality. A difficult problem that arises is to maintain good client power saving when AP power saving is introduced. This is especially true when carrying multiple real-time traffic flows such as H.263 video, where the payload size varies randomly over short time periods. In this paper, we first present protocol modifications for power saving quality-of-service (QoS) enabled access points (PSQAP). We then focus on the transmission of bursty real-time H.263 video over a PSQAP. A variety of mechanisms are proposed for this purpose, which result in various tradeoffs between station and PSQAP power saving performance. Analytical models and simulation experiments are used to assess the performance of the video scheduling algorithms. The best overall performance is obtained using a mechanism that combines a novel variant of the power save multi-poll (PSMP) protocol with a scheduling mechanism based on a discrete autoregressive video prediction model.