An Effective Power Conservation Scheme for IEEE 802.11 Wireless Networks

In IEEE 802.11 wireless networks, a mobile station (MS) can power down the transceiver to save energy. To achieve power conservation, an access point (AP) periodically broadcasts beacons to notify the associated MSs about their traffic indications, and the MSs periodically wake up to listen to the beacons. The MS awake time scheduling is an important issue, which affects the number of simultaneously awake MSs to compete for access. We propose a power conservation scheme to optimally schedule the awake times among the MSs, such that the number of MSs awaking at the same time is minimal. Our study indicates that the proposed scheme demonstrates good performance in terms of frame loss and delay time.