A novel energy-efficient medium access control over saturated IEEE 802.11 WLANs

Nowadays, people mostly use mobile devices to access the Internet, communicate, socialize and handle their short or long-term business. As these devices rely on their batteries, energy-efficiency has become one of the major issues for mobile devices. In this context, the Wireless Network Interface Card (WNIC) has to be taken into account carefully as it consumes a significant portion of the overall system energy. In this paper¹, we aim to reduce the energy consumption of mobile devices in wireless networks by maintaining mobile stations in the doze state as much as possible, without degrading the expected throughput even in highly-dynamic channel conditions. In the proposed scheme, each station only makes use of its local information and does not cause any overhead on the network. Therefore, the proposed scheme can be easily implemented without any changes on the current IEEE 802.11 standard. Stations performing the proposed scheme can fairly coexist with the other stations that use the standard DCF protocol in the network. Performance of the proposed scheme has been examined by numerical analyses and extensive simulations. The results illustrate that the proposed scheme is very efficient and reduces the energy consumption of mobile stations under a wide range of contention levels.