An energy-efficient architecture for the medium access controller of IEEE 802.11 WLANs

Energy conservation (EC) is an important issue in the design of mobile devices that are characterized by limited battery energy. This paper concentrates on EC strategies for the MAC of the 802.11 WLAN. A novel architecture, which we call split FIFO-buffer architecture (SFBA), is proposed for the 802.11 MAC to achieve the goal of EC. Circuits of the SFBA are designed using the VHDL code. An Altera software is employed to evaluate the power dissipation. EC capability of the SFBA is assessed with reference to a conventional architecture. We also find that the EC performance of the SFBA depends on the traffic loads