RA-PSM: a rate-aware power saving mechanism in multi-rate wireless LANs

Improving energy efficiency is one of the most important issues in wireless local area networks (WLANs) and a power saving mechanism (PSM) has been proposed in IEEE 802.11 WLANs. However, the conventional PSMs do not consider multi-rate transmissions and thus the waiting time for retrieving buffered frames from the access point can be unnecessarily long and more energy can be consumed. In this paper, we propose a rate-aware power saving mechanism (RA-PSM) in multi-rate WLANs. In RA-PSM, a station sets its contention window size inversely proportional to the transmission rate and thus a station with higher transmission rate can request the buffered frames at the access point with higher priority. As a result, the overall channel waiting time can be reduced and the energy consumption can be saved accordingly. Analytical and simulation results demonstrate that RA-PSM can reduce the average channel waiting time and the energy consumption by up to 77 and 40.3 %, respectively, compared with the conventional IEEE 802.11 PSM.