An energy-efficient MAC protocol with downlink traffic scheduling strategy in IEEE 802.11 infrastructure WLANs

To support mobility, mobile devices are powered by batteries with limited energy. Thus, the good design of energy efficiency becomes one of the most important issues in wireless networks. A well-designed energy-efficient MAC protocols can be realized with both minimum energy consumption as well as maximum data throughput and can be easily implemented in products with de facto standards. Based on IEEE 802.11 infrastructure WLANs, we propose an energy-efficient MAC protocol which employs a novel approach to schedule those to-be-transmitted frames for saving energy by reducing the total waiting time and the collisions of the frames. Fault tolerance issues are also considered in the proposed protocol because frames are transmitted in fading interference wireless environment. Through analyses and simulations, we demonstrate that our protocol presents a better performance than IEEE 802.11 and other protocols not only in energy efficiency but also in aggregate throughput and frame transmission delay.