A distributed energy efficient packet transmission algorithm for the IEEE802.11 WLAN

IEEE802.11 based WLAN networks are considered to be the default broadband access network supporting a range of traffic sources. In this paper a dual parameter based cost function is proposed which can be used to determine the transmission data rate for a transmitting WLAN device in order to maximize the energy efficiency of an infrastructure based IEEE802.11 network. The proposed cost function uses the MAC delay and the queue length of each transmitter to adaptively adjust the transmission data rate using the link adaptation procedure of the IEEE802.11 standard. The proposed algorithm requires no additional signaling or modification of the standard MAC protocol. An OPNET based simulation model has been developed to study the performance of the proposed algorithm. Simulation results show that the dual parameter based cost function offers significant energy savings while maintaining QoS requirements of traffic sources