Energy-adaptive scheduling and queue management in wireless LAN mesh networks

Energy efficiency is of critical importance in future wireless communication systems where networked low-power devices relying on batteries should be able to communicate transparently. We present a novel cross-layer energy-adaptive scheduling and queue management framework EAED (Energy Aware Early Detection) for minimizing energy consumption in WLAN mesh networks. EAED aims at saving energy by delaying and early dropping packets with respect to target delay and packet loss constraints. We argue that gracefully trading off energy against QoS is justified by future networking scenarios where high connectivity is more important than bandwidth. We show performance results of EAED with real-time traffic in realistic WLAN Mesh network simulation scenarios and discuss possible use-cases for EAED framework. We conclude that considerable energy savings can be obtained with our scheme under certain limitations and propose ideas for further improvement.