Application aware scheduling for power management on IEEE 802.11

Asynchronous medium access protocols, like the MAC of IEEE 802.11, are inherently energy inefficient. Hosts have to continuously listen to the air waiting for packet arrivals. The power management mode of operation of IEEE 802.12 represents a significant improvement, however still has energy inefficiencies due to the one-fits-all policy and the medium access contention. To maximize energy efficiency and user satisfaction, the power management mechanism has to take into account application requirements. Traditional QoS specifications ignore energy consumption, and we argue that all service classes, including best effort, should be subdivided in energy consumption sublevels. We developed an application aware power management mechanism on top of the IEEE 802.12 power management which works on the trade-off between delay and power consumption, and allows per-flow customization.