2,104 research outputs found
Nap: Practical Micro-Sleeps for 802.11 WLANs
In this paper, we revisit the idea of putting interfaces to sleep during
'packet overhearing' (i.e., when there are ongoing transmissions addressed to
other stations) from a practical standpoint. To this aim, we perform a robust
experimental characterisation of the timing and consumption behaviour of a
commercial 802.11 card. We design Nap, a local standard-compliant
energy-saving mechanism that leverages micro-sleep opportunities inherent to
the CSMA operation of 802.11 WLANs. This mechanism is backwards compatible and
incrementally deployable, and takes into account the timing limitations of
existing hardware, as well as practical CSMA-related issues (e.g., capture
effect). According to the performance assessment carried out through
trace-based simulation, the use of our scheme would result in a 57% reduction
in the time spent in overhearing, thus leading to an energy saving of 15.8% of
the activity time.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figure
Reducing false wake-up in contention-based wake-up control of wireless LANs
This paper studies the potential problem and performance when tightly integrating a low power wake-up radio (WuR) and a power-hungry wireless LAN (WLAN) module for energy efficient channel access. In this model, a WuR monitors the channel, performs carrier sense, and activates its co-located WLAN module when the channel becomes ready for transmission. Different from previous methods, the node that will be activated is not decided in advance, but decided by distributed contention. Because of the wake-up latency of WLAN modules, multiple nodes may be falsely activated, except the node that will actually transmit. This is called a false wake-up problem and it is solved from three aspects in this work: (i) resetting backoff counter of each node in a way as if it is frozen in a wake-up period, (ii) reducing false wake-up time by immediately putting a WLAN module into sleep once a false wake-up is inferred, and (iii) reducing false wake-up probability by adjusting contention window. Analysis shows that false wake-ups, instead of collisions, become the dominant energy overhead. Extensive simulations confirm that the proposed method (WuR-ESOC) effectively reduces energy overhead, by up to 60% compared with state-of-the-arts, achieving a better tradeoff between throughput and energy consumption
Multi-Round Contention in Wireless LANs with Multipacket Reception
Multi-packet reception (MPR) has been recognized as a powerful
capacity-enhancement technique for random-access wireless local area networks
(WLANs). As is common with all random access protocols, the wireless channel is
often under-utilized in MPR WLANs. In this paper, we propose a novel
multi-round contention random-access protocol to address this problem. This
work complements the existing random-access methods that are based on
single-round contention. In the proposed scheme, stations are given multiple
chances to contend for the channel until there are a sufficient number of
``winning" stations that can share the MPR channel for data packet
transmission. The key issue here is the identification of the optimal time to
stop the contention process and start data transmission. The solution
corresponds to finding a desired tradeoff between channel utilization and
contention overhead. In this paper, we conduct a rigorous analysis to
characterize the optimal strategy using the theory of optimal stopping. An
interesting result is that the optimal stopping strategy is a simple
threshold-based rule, which stops the contention process as soon as the total
number of winning stations exceeds a certain threshold. Compared with the
conventional single-round contention protocol, the multi-round contention
scheme significantly enhances channel utilization when the MPR capability of
the channel is small to medium. Meanwhile, the scheme automatically falls back
to single-round contention when the MPR capability is very large, in which case
the throughput penalty due to random access is already small even with
single-round contention
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