Enhanced Power Saving in Next Generation Wireless LANs

Battery powered handheld devices need to operate for extended periods of time, and thus require to be energy conserving. This paper evaluates the performance of a new power saving scheme, called PSMP (power save multiple poll), developed for the upcoming IEEE 802.11n WLANs. Using both analysis and simulations, we investigate the benefits of using PSMP in a wireless LAN having multiple voice-over-IP (VoIP) clients. To boost the reliability of a PSMP sequence, we propose a new recovery scheme, which we call PSMP recovery. Our results show that the PSMP recovery scheme significantly improves the efficiency of the original PSMP sequence.