An Energy-Efficient Power Control Approach for IEEE 802.11n Wireless LANs

With large amount of energy consumed in wireless LAN (WLAN) system, it becomes an important and meaningful issue to reduce the energy consumption of wireless communication devices nowadays. Although different kinds of energy-saving strategies have been proposed to achieve this goal, few of them take the new features of the IEEE 802.11n standard into account. In this paper, we analyze the energy-saving problem from two relevant aspects: the energy-saving measurement criteria and the effect of the new features of the IEEE 802.11n standard. Based on the analysis, we propose an adaptive transmission power control mechanism (A-TPCM) to reduce the power consumption and improve the energy efficiency of 802.11n WLAN devices. We evaluate the performance of the A-TPCM in terms of multi-factors. Particularly, simulation results show that the A-TPCM can significantly decrease energy consumption of 802.11n WLAN devices in different conditions.