Application based energy consumption characterization of IEEE 802.11n/ac access points

Due to the rapid increase in the number of deployments of wireless local area networks (WLANs), the problem of energy efficiency has to be addressed for these networks. Until recent developments in hardware and software, the access points (APs) were kept switched on all the times even if there are no users that need connection (e.g. at night). Today, APs can support sleep mode which enables an AP to reduce energy consumption when there is no data transmission. However, the current implementation of sleep mode performs in a binary format where an AP either can be in sleep mode or transmits with full power. This binary format cannot provide both users´ satisfaction in a data communication and energy efficiency at the same time. In this paper, unlike binary energy model we design different energy modes which take into account not only the energy consumption but also quality of experience (QoE) at user side in terms of data rate.