Energy aware scheduling and queue management for next generation Wi-Fi routers

An increasing number of internet connected devices access large multimedia files over the Internet. Therefore, the bandwidth demand is exponentially increasing. To satisfy users´ demands, multi-band wireless routers, which simultaneously support several bands, are developed. However, current multiband routers do not attempt to maximize the utilization of frequency bands nor consider the energy consumption. There are a limited number of previous works on multi-band wireless routers and those works do not address the energy efficiency and utilization problems of multi-band routers. Therefore, we have proposed an energy aware scheduling algorithm to ensure maximize utilization of multi-band routers while decreasing energy consumption through band sharing. Results show that the proposed method uses system resources efficiently and decreases energy consumption of the multi-band systems up to 60%. Our proposed scheduling algorithm and related analysis will help network engineers build next generation wireless routers by considering performance metrics such as throughput and energy usage of multi-band Wi-Fi routers.