Wireless Access to Internet via IEEE 802.11: An Optimal Control Strategy for Minimizing the Energy Consumption

The IEEE 802.11 standard is the most mature technology to provide wireless connectivity for fixed, portable and moving stations within a local area. Wireless communications and the mobile nature of devices involved in constructing WLANs generate new research issues compared with wired networks: dynamic topologies, limited bandwidth, energy-constrained operations, noisy channel. In this paper, we deal with the issue of minimizing the energy consumed by each station to perform a successful transmission. Specifically, by exploiting analytical formulas for the energy consumption, we derive the theoretical lower bound for the energy consumed to successfully transmit a message. This knowledge allows us to define a novel transmission control strategy based on simple and low-cost energy consumption estimates that permits each station to optimize at run-time its power utilization. Our strategy is completely distributed and it does not require any information on the number of stations in the network. Simulation results prove the effectiveness of our transmission control strategy. Specifically, the IEEE 802.11 extended with our algorithm approaches the theoretical lower bound for the energy consumption in all the configurations analyzed.

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