Access point power saving in solar/battery powered IEEE 802.11 ESS mesh networks

IEEE 802.11 access point (AP) power saving is an important feature for solar/battery powered ESS mesh networks. In this paper we propose a media access control (MAC) protocol for power-aware multihop infrastructure, based on extensions to IEEE 802.11(e). A power saving mesh AP includes a network allocation map (NAM) in its beacon broadcasts which specifies its temporal operation, and thus coordinates traffic delivery and power saving at both end stations and at the AP. A simple algorithm is proposed for dynamically updating channel activities so that best-effort traffic load changes can be quickly accommodated. Simulation and analytic results are presented for the proposed system which show that the proposed protocol and algorithm can achieve good AP power consumption without any significant end station performance degradation