WLAN power consumption analytical model

Efforts are underway in improving power conservation in WLAN devices and thus increasing the duration between recharging the battery. In order to evaluate the performance of new energy saving methods, there is a need for analytical tools. This paper proposes a simple analytical model that provides the average power consumption of a WLAN device. The proposed model is based on Markov models that provide throughput estimation. Our analytical model is compared to a network simulation. The error between the two is kept below 1% for a very wide number of cases.