On the trade-off between throughput maximization and energy consumption minimization in IEEE 802.11 WLANs

Understanding and optimizing the energy consumption of wireless devices is critical to maximize the network lifetime and to provide guidelines for the design of new protocols and interfaces. In this work, we first provide an accurate analysis of the energy performance of an IEEE 802.11 WLAN, and then we derive the configuration to optimize it. We further analyze the impact of the energy configuration of the stations on the throughput performance, and we discuss under which circumstances throughput and energy efficiency can be both jointly maximized and where they constitute different challenges. Our findings are that, although an energy-optimized configuration typically yields gains in terms of throughput as compared against the default configuration, it comes with a reduction in performance as compared against the maximum-bandwidth configuration, a reduction that depends on the energy parameters of the wireless interface.