Dynamic Antenna Management for Uplink Energy Efficiency on 802.11n Mobile Devices

An increasing number of mobile devices are being equipped with 802.11n interfaces to support bandwidth-intensive applications; however, the improved bandwidth increases power consumption. To address the issue, researchers are focusing on antenna management. In this paper, we present a dynamic antenna management (DAM) scheme to improve the uplink energy efficiency on mobile devices whose packet workloads may vary significantly and frequently. First, we model antenna management as an optimization problem, with the objective of minimizing the energy required to transmit a sequence of variable-length packets with random arrival times. Then, we propose an optimal offline algorithm to solve the problem, as well as a competitive online algorithm that has a provable performance guarantee and allows compatible implementations on 802.11n mobile devices. To evaluate our scheme, we conducted extensive simulations based on real mobile user traces and application transmission patterns. Nearly all commercial 802.11n mobile devices support the power save mode (PSM). Our results demonstrate that DAM can improve the energy efficiency of PSM significantly at a cost of slight throughput degradation.