Schedule-Aware Power Management for Energy-Efficiency Improvement in 802.11u WLAN

Mobile stations supporting the 802.11u standard can access WLAN automatically when they are within the coverage of the network service provided by this WLAN. To achieve this goal, the stations need to keep “on” states includingidleandactiveall the time. However, studies have noted that the idleness of stations often lead to considerable power consumption. Although the conventional power saving mode (PSM) can provide energy saving effect to some extent, its own disadvantage leads to lower energy efficiency when the number of stations accessing the target WLAN. In this paper, we propose a Schedule-Aware PSM (S-PSM), which can improve the energy efficiency in 802.11u WLAN. Particularly, we use the Generic advertisement service (GAS) defined in 802.11u standard to broadcast the transmission schedule information and all stations switch off their radios based on this information accordingly. We introduce the Respond Contention Window to reduce the collision probability of competition channel. When there is no packet in the access point (AP), AP broadcasts the GAS frame and actives the Idle Timer. All stations will turn into sleep and AP will not send GAS frame until Idle Timer expires. Simulations have shown that our proposed scheme can significantly reduce power consumption compared with the conventional PSM.