Energy-aware radio link control for OFDM-based WLAN

Next generation wireless local area network (WLAN) terminals have to cope with increasing performance requirements while energy budgets are more and more constrained by portability. Next to low power circuit and architecture design, system-level power management is a key technology to fill this gap. Recently, radio link control techniques have been proposed, not only as a way to maximize performance but also to reach energy awareness. Transmit rate and power are adapted to meet exactly the user requirements while minimizing the average power consumption. However, schemes proposed so far do not exploit the characteristics of the specific modulation scheme considered in most recent WLAN standards: orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). In this paper, we design a practical energy aware radio link control scheme, optimized for OFDM transceivers and compatible with current standards. Simulation results depict up to 80% transceiver power reduction when compared with throughput maximizing schemes.