Wireless Access to Internet via IEEE 802.11: An Optimal Control Strategy for Minimizing the Energy Consumption

The IEEE 802.11 standard is the most mature technology to provide wireless connectivity for fixed, portable and moving stations within a local area. Wireless communications and the mobile nature of devices involved in constructing WLANs generate new research issues compared with wired networks: dynamic topologies, limited bandwidth, energy-constrained operations, noisy channel. In this paper, we deal with the issue of minimizing the energy consumed by each station to perform a successful transmission. Specifically, by exploiting analytical formulas for the energy consumption, we derive the theoretical lower bound for the energy consumed to successfully transmit a message