Analysis and optimization of energy efficiency in 802.11 distributed coordination function

Energy efficiency has been a bottleneck in the wireless local area network (LAN) based communication of portable wireless devices. This paper introduces an analytical model to investigate the energy efficiency of 802.11 distributed coordinated function (DCF) under both ideal channel and error prone environment. The two major factors contributing to the extra energy consumption in 802.11 DCF: contention and transmission errors, are analyzed thoroughly. Based on the analysis, a scheme of choosing optimal minimum contention window size to optimize the energy consumption under both ideal and error prone environment is proposed. Our extensive simulation results are observed to match very well with the analytical results, which indicate that the analytical model is accurate.