Energy Efficiency in Wireless Local Area Networks
Oswald Jumira, Sherali Zeadally · 2012
This chapter presents an overview of energy efficiency in wireless local area networks (WLANs). It presents energy-efficient techniques and deployment strategies currently in use and recently proposed in the literature. Research and design of energy-efficient WLANs to support the increasing number of users and devices, data traffic and Internet-based application deployment are of paramount importance. The chapter illustrates a sample architecture of a centralized large-scale WLAN with Wi-Fi-enabled devices all connected to the Internet through a WLAN switch. There is an exponential increase in the number of Wi-Fi-enabled devices and Internet users, leading to an increased deployment of WLANs. To reduce the amount of energy consumed by the Wi-Fi-enabled and bandwidth-hungry devices, investment in energy efficiency is required. A cross-layer energy-efficient design approach is necessary to improve the energy efficiency for the WLANs. Recent designs and deployment strategies that include IEEE 802.11n have been designed with energy efficiency in mind.