On the Energy Efciency of IEEE 802.11 WLANs
Pablo Serrano, Andrés García‐Saavedra, Matthias Hollick, Albert Banchs · 2010
Understanding the energy consumption of wireless interfaces is critical to provide guidelines for the design and implementation of new protocols or interfaces. In this work we analyze the energy performance of an IEEE 802.11 WLAN. Our contributions are as follows: i )w e present an accurate analytical model that is able to predict the energy consumption, ii )w e present an approximate model that sacri ces accuracy for the sake of analytical tractability, iii )b ased on this simpli ed analysis, we derive the optimal conguration to maximize energy efciency of a WLAN, and iv) nally, we also analyze the trade- off between throughput and energy efciency that IEEE 802.11 imposes. While most of these results consider a homogeneous WLAN scenario where all stations share the same energy features, we also discuss the case of heterogeneous environments, where different devices show different power consumption char- acteristics.