Named Data Networking Enabled Power Saving Mode Design for WLAN

The energy consumption of wireless interface is critical to power-constrained mobile devices. To improve energy efficiency for WLAN stations, power saving mode (PSM) is proposed, to manage the time spent in idle listening (IL) state. The hurdle is that the receiver has no knowledge about when the pending data will arrive under end-to-end communication protocols (TCP/IP), making each station spend enormous time in IL to wait for the pending data. To overcome this limitation, in this paper, we propose a named data networking (NDN) enabled PSM, namely, NDN-PSM, which leverages NDN communication architecture to cut down unnecessary IL time. In particular, we devise two new power states in NDN-PSM, i.e., light doze and deep doze, to precisely map to the underlying data arriving states. The inherent receiver-driven pattern of NDN can effectively drive the stations to the deep doze state for power saving, and to light doze state for timely data reception. Considering the IL time waste during channel contention, we further design a channel contention control mechanism in NDN-PSM, in which stations will switch to the light doze state if the channel is perceived to be busy. The power consumption model of the proposed NDN-PSM is theoretically analyzed and verified via numerical results. At last, we implement NDN-PSM in NS-3 by adopting the ndnSIM module and conduct extensive simulations to demonstrate the efficacy of NDN-PSM. Specifically, compared to the existing PSM mechanism, NDN-PSM reduces 56% power consumption by cutting down unnecessary IL time, and meanwhile enables low-delay transmission.