IAPS: Interference Aware Power Saving for High-Efficiency Wireless LANs in Dense Networks

Battery-driven circuit design for power saving wireless local area networks (WLANs) has become more and more important because mobile devices and applications are required to support high throughput in wide service coverage and, at the same time, exhibit long battery lifetime. However, in dense networks, multiple and dynamic channel access leads to a higher probability of co-channel and adjacent channel interference. Therefore, the energy efficiency of IEEE 802.11-based WLANs is severely degraded by such interference. In this letter, an interference-aware power saving (IAPS) mechanism is proposed. The IAPS incorporates a signal quality and interference measurement process for determining link quality based on the incoming signal from a receiver. In the IAPS, the signal field decoding process is used to determine the required link quality for the received signal, and a physical layer power saving control based on the estimated link quality and the required link quality is implemented. The proposed IAPS technique achieves 29% and 26% average energy efficiency improvement over the conventional scheme and the channel hopping scheme, respectively.