Energy-efficient airtime allocation in multi-rate multi-power-level wireless LANs
Daji Qiao, Kang Geun Shin · 2007
This paper considers the energy-conservation problem in multi-rate multi-power-level wireless local area networks (WLANs). This problem is addressed from a unique angle — the system-level fair-ness which is significantly different from most of current research that focuses on improving the performance of each individual wire-less station. To emphasize fair energy-consumption among con-tending stations, we introduce a new fairness notion, called energy-conservation fairness, in contrast to the conventional throughput fairness and airtime fairness. Another contribution of the paper is an energy-efficient airtime allocation scheme, which allocates air-time shares to contending stations in such a way that the combined airtime and energy-conservation fairness is achieved. Our simu-lation results show that, when the energy-conservation fairness is considered, both aggregate system throughput and overall system energy-efficiency can be improved significantly with all contend-ing stations consuming a similar amount of energy.