In this paper, we revisit the idea of putting interfaces to sleep during packet overhearing (i.e., when there are ongoing transmissions addressed to other stations) from a practical standpoint. To this aim, we perform a robust experimental characterisation of the timing and consumption behaviour of a commercial 802.11 card. We design μNap, a local standard-compliant energy-saving mechanism that leverages micro-sleep opportunities inherent to the CSMA operation of 802.11 WLANs. This mechanism is backwards compatible and incrementally deployable, and takes into account the timing limitations of existing hardware, as well as practical CSMA-related issues (e.g., capture effect). According to the performance assessment carried out through trace-based simulation, the use of our scheme would result in a 57 reduction in the time spent in overhearing, thus leading to an energy saving of 15.8 of the activity time.
Since its conception, 802.11 has attempted to minimise idle listening with the introduction of the PS mode, and some previous work followed this path. For instance, Liu and Zhong @cite_25 proposed @math PM to exploit short idle intervals ( @math 100 ms) without buffering or cooperation. @math PM predicts the arrival time of the next frame and puts the interface in PS mode while no arrivals are expected. This mechanism demonstrated poor granularity (tens of ms) on existing hardware and leads to performance degradation due to frame loss. Therefore, it is only suitable for low-traffic scenarios.
@cite_25
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WiFi interface is known to be a primary energy consumer in mobile devices, and idle listening (IL) is the dominant source of energy consumption in WiFi. Most existing protocols, such as the 802.11 power-saving mode (PSM), attempt to reduce the time spent in IL by sleep scheduling. However, through an extensive analysis of real-world traffic, we found more than 60 percent of energy is consumed in IL, even with PSM enabled. To remedy this problem, we propose Energy-Minimizing idle Listening (E-MiLi) that reduces the power consumption in IL, given that the time spent in IL has already been optimized by sleep scheduling. Observing that radio power consumption decreases proportionally to its clock rate, E-MiLi adaptively downclocks the radio during IL, and reverts to full clock rate when an incoming packet is detected or a packet has to be transmitted. E-MiLi incorporates sampling rate invariant detection, ensuring accurate packet detection and address filtering even when the receiver's sampling clock rate is much lower than the signal bandwidth. Further, it employs an opportunistic downclocking mechanism to optimize the efficiency of switching clock rate, based on a simple interface to existing MAC-layer scheduling protocols. We have implemented E-MiLi on the USRP software radio platform. Our experimental evaluation shows that E-MiLi can detect packets with close to 100 percent accuracy even with downclocking by a factor of 16. When integrated with 802.11, E-MiLi can reduce energy consumption by around 44 percent for 92 percent of users in real-world wireless networks. We consider wireless LANs such as IEEE 802.11 operating in the unlicensed radio spectrum. While their nominal bit rates have increased considerably, the MAC layer remains practically unchanged despite much research effort spent on improving its performance. We observe that most proposals for tuning the access method focus on a single aspect and disregard others. Our objective is to define an access method optimized for throughput and fairness, able to dynamically adapt to physical channel conditions, to operate near optimum for a wide range of error rates, and to provide equal time shares when hosts use different bit rates.We propose a novel access method derived from 802.11 DCF [2] (Distributed Coordination Function) in which all hosts use similar values of the contention window CW to benefit from good short-term access fairness. We call our method Idle Sense, because each host observes the mean number of idle slots between transmission attempts to dynamically control its contention window. Unlike other proposals, Idle Sense enables each host to estimate its frame error rate, which can be used for switching to the right bit rate. We present simulations showing how the method leads to high throughput, low collision overhead, and low delay. The method also features fast reactivity and time-fair channel allocation. While the 802.11 power saving mode (PSM) and its enhancements can reduce power consumption by putting the wireless network interface (WNI) into sleep as much as possible, they either require additional infrastructure support, or may degrade the transmission throughput and cause additional transmission delay. These schemes are not suitable for long and bulk data transmissions with strict QoS requirements on wireless devices. With increasingly abundant bandwidth available on the Internet, we have observed that TCP congestion control is often not a constraint of bulk data transmissions as bandwidth throttling is widely used in practice. In this paper, instead of further manipulating the trade-off between the power saving and the incurred delay, we effectively explore the power saving potential by considering the bandwidth throttling on streaming downloading servers. We propose an application-independent protocol, called PSM-throttling. With a quick detection on the TCP flow throughput, a client can identify bandwidth throttling connections with a low cost Since the throttling enables us to reshape the TCP traffic into periodic bursts with the same average throughput as the server transmission rate, the client can accurately predict the arriving time of packets and turn on off the WNI accordingly. PSM-throttling can minimize power consumption on TCP-based bulk traffic by effectively utilizing available Internet bandwidth without degrading the application's performance perceived by the user. Furthermore, PSM-throttling is client-centric, and does not need any additional infrastructure support. Our lab-environment and Internet-based evaluation results show that PSM-throttling can effectively improve energy savings (by up to 75 ) and or the QoS for a broad types of TCP-based applications, including streaming, pseudo streaming, and large file downloading, over existing PSM-like methods. We propose a novel power saving strategy called Sleep during Neighbor-Addressed Frame (SNAF) for improving energy efficiency of IEEE 802.11 based wireless networks. IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) radios that employ SNAF mode can turn OFF their wireless transceivers (i.e., put radios in sleep mode) within specific periods of neighbor-addressed frames while they are being received. The sleep duration of transceivers is easy to determine with no loss of packet's critical control information. The proposed SNAF mode operation does not have any negative effect on network throughput and even complements Power Saving Mode (PSM) available in 802.11 standard. We further propose GreenFrame format for next generation wireless networks. In experiments conducted in wireless LAN scenarios, we observed savings as much as 57.8 when we implement SNAF mode in 802.11 standard and up to 49.5 when we implement SNAF mode in 802.11 PSM.