Measurement and Simulation of the Energy Consumption of a WLAN Interface

The energy efficiency of a wireless network interface is a major design issue since mobile devices are often constrained by the battery. The work presented here follows the question which parameter of a WLAN interface can be adjusted to improve energy efficiency.We measured the power consumption of a WLAN interface for various operational modes and parameter settings for a non-impaired Radio Frequency (RF) channel and derived the energy consumed to transmit one bit of payload. The power consumption values were used to parameterize a simulation model of the WLAN interface which was in turn used to investigate the influence of parameters like RF power level, packet size, and data rate on the energy efficiency in case the radio channel becomes worse. Additionally, an analytical energy consumption model for a simple case is presented. Our results indicate, that control of the RF power level and data rate adaption have the highest impact on the energy efficiency.