PSM-throttling: Minimizing Energy Consumption for Bulk Data Communications in WLANs

— 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 throughpu...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICNP
• Authors: Enhua Tan, Lei Guo, Songqing Chen, Xiaodong Zhang
• Keywords: Bandwidth Throttling, Bulk Data Transmissions, ICNP 2007, Network Protocols, Power Saving