Energy-efficient multi-polling scheme for wireless LANs

In the past few years, IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs (WLANs) has rapidly gained large popularity for broadband wireless access. With the growing of various applications, users are demanding features such as higher throughput while keeping respectable operation time for their devices. To provide higher system bandwidth utilization, multi-polling mechanisms are often employed to reduce protocol overhead. However, they require wireless stations (STAs) to spend much time in overhearing which tends to waste energy and reduce battery lifetime. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient multi-polling mechanism which combines power management strategy with a low overhead Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol. The main idea is to put STAs into the Doze state and determine a suitable wake-up time schedule to statistically achieve desirable guarantee of bandwidth utilization. From both analysis and simulation results, we found that, compared with the original ordered-contention multi-polling scheme, our proposed mechanism saves up to 80% of energy for a network consisting of 20 polled STAs with 5% loss of system bandwidth utilization as tradeoff. The significant saving of energy is a consequence of alleviating the overhearing problem with well scheduled wake-up times for STAs.