A rate-aware power saving mechanism in multi-rate wireless LANs

In this paper, we propose a rate-aware power saving mechanism (RA-PSM) in multi-rate wireless LANs. In RA-PSM, the channel access order is determined depending on the transmission rate (or channel conditions). Since a station with higher transmission rate can request the buffered frames at the access point with higher priority, the overall channel waiting time can be reduced. Preliminary simulation results illustrate that RA-PSM can reduce the average waiting time by 45% compared with the conventional IEEE 802.11 PSM.