A power management scheme for the IEEE 802.11 based WLANs

Energy efficiency is an important aspect in wireless networks. We investigate the power management in the IEEE 802.11 and propose an enhanced power management scheme for the infrastructure mode network to improve energy efficiency. In our scheme, we set up multiple queues in an AP (Access Point) buffer, one queue for each station. The AP schedules the transmission sequence of buffered packets by piggybacking a bit map in TIM (Traffic Indication Map) message or data packets. Also, we propose to use the Queue-by-Queue algorithm to schedule the traffic in the AP. Our proposed power management scheme improves energy efficiency without degrading the response time of the system. Our simulation results are in good agreement with the analysis.