WiFi usage significantly reduces the battery lifetime of handheld devices
such as smartphones and tablets, due to its high energy consumption. In this
paper, we propose "Life-Add": a Lifetime Adjustable design for WiFi networks,
where the devices are powered by battery, electric power, and/or renewable
energy. In Life-Add, a device turns off its radio to save energy when the
channel is sensed to be busy, and sleeps for a random time period before
sensing the channel again. Life-Add carefully controls the devices' average
sleep periods to improve their throughput while satisfying their operation time
requirement. It is proven that Life-Add achieves near-optimal proportional-fair
utility performance for single access point (AP) scenarios. Moreover, Life-Add
alleviates the near-far effect and hidden terminal problem in general multiple
AP scenarios. Our ns-3 simulations show that Life-Add simultaneously improves
the lifetime, throughput, and fairness performance of WiFi networks, and
coexists harmoniously with IEEE 802.11.Comment: This is the technical report of our WiOpt paper. The paper received
the best student paper award at IEEE WiOpt 2013. The first three authors are
co-primary author
