A mechanism for load proportional energy use in wireless local area networks

From the perspective of energy efficiency, a major drawback of existing wireless networks is that the power consumption rate of the networking hardware stays at levels close to the maximum, even when the offered traffic load is low. To address this issue, this paper presents a mechanism for load proportional energy usage in wireless networks. The proposed mechanism is based on changing the operating clock frequency of the network interface cards as a function of the offered load, in order to reduce to energy consumption. To this end, we propose a frequency selection mechanism that tries to ensure the stability of the queues while minimizing the energy consumption. The proposed mechanism has been evaluated through simulations.