Micro power management of active 802.11 interfaces

Wireless interfaces are major power consumers on mobile systems. Considerable research has improved the energy efficiency of elongated idle periods or created more elongated idle periods in wireless interfaces, often requiring cooperation from applications or the network infrastructure. With increasing wireless mobile data, it has become critical to improve the energy efficiency of active wireless interfaces. In this work, we present micro power management (?PM), a solution inspired by the mismatch between the high performance of state-of-the-art 802.11 interfaces and the modest data rate requirements by many popular network applications. ?PM enables an 802.11 interface to enter unreachable power-saving modes even between MAC frames, without noticeable impact on the traffic flow. To control data loss, ?PM leverages the retransmission mechanism in 802.11 and controls frame delay to adapt to demanded network throughput with minimal cooperation from the access point. Based on a theoretic...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: MOBISYS
• Authors: Jiayang Liu, Lin Zhong
• Keywords: Active Wireless Interfaces, MOBISYS 2008, State-of-the-art 802.11 Interfaces, Wireless Interfaces, Wireless Networks