Study of Power Saving Scheme Suitable for Wireless LAN in Multimedia Communication

Wireless LAN access is now being offered by small personal terminals in addition to laptops. Since these terminals have very limited battery capacity, wireless LAN interfaces that offer some form of power saving are essential. IEEE802.11 specifies PSM (power save management); it reduces power consumption by suspending some communications functions. However, since multicasting and broadcasting are invariably received by all terminals regardless of PSM, the terminals unnecessarily consume electric power even if the terminal is not engaged in multicasting. This paper clarifies this problem, and proposes a scheme for reducing power consumption and the results of an experiment confirm its excellent performance.