Investigating MAC-layer schemes to promote doze mode in 802.11-based WLANs

This paper addresses the energy saving issue in 802.11-based WLANs. Previous work has pointed out that the power management function in the IEEE 802.11 standard presents some inefficiencies, thus other solutions to energy saving are needed. We focus on the infrastructure of WLAN and explore the possibility to increase the time period that a wireless station spends in the low-power operational state, the so-called doze state. We present an energy-saving, MAC-layer scheme which is derived from the 802.11 DCF. The proposed mechanism enables a station to enter the doze state during channel contention by exploiting the virtual carrier sense mechanism and the backoff function. We compare the performance obtained through the proposed scheme with the results attained through both the standard DCF and a simple active/doze state switching mechanism.