Proposal of SCTP Tunneling for Energy-Efficient TCP Data Transfer over a Wireless LAN Environment

The energy efficiency of a wireless client is an important issue on wireless network environments. When multiple TCP flows are established from a wireless client, it is difficult for a wireless network interface of the wireless client to understand and control the timings for sleeping. In addition, the frequent state transitions between active and sleep modes consume energy, resulting in the reduction of energy efficiency. In this report, we propose an energy-efficient method for multiple TCP flows in wireless LAN environments. The proposed method is called as SCTP tunneling, that aggregates multiple TCP flows to a single SCTP association between a wireless client and an access point to control the timings of packet transmission and reception. Furthermore, it lengthens sleep time by transmitting and receiving multiple packets in a bursty fashion. We construct a mathematical model for an energy consumption model of SCTP tunneling to assess its energy efficiency. Through numerical examples, we show the proposed method can reduce up to around 70 % energy consumption.