Energy efficient RoF based centralized enterprise WLAN (CE-WLAN)

In 802.11 standard, meager effort has been invested towards devising energy efficient WLAN communication. Especially with the massive deployment of centralized enterprise WLAN (CE-WLAN), in indoor networks, a lot of access points (APs) are densely packed for increasing the capacity offered. But most of the APs deployed are idle for a larger period of time over a day. This paper proposes to use a centralized controlled distributed antenna systems (DAS) employing Radio over Fiber (RoF) technique for energy efficient management of such indoor network. This paper proposes an antenna selection scheme which provides overall coverage of the indoor network. We also discuss different real life scenarios where RoF based CE-WLAN is very efficient in reducing overall energy consumption of the network. We also validate the usefulness of RoF CE-WLAN (using real life WLAN traces) based on association based strategy and show that it gain extensively for clustered network entity scenario.