Cutting Down Idle Listening Time: A NDN-Enabled Power Saving Mode Design for WLAN

The energy consumption for wireless interface is important for the power-constraint mobile and sensor devices. To improve energy efficiency in WLAN (such as Wi-Fi), power saving mode (PSM) is proposed, with an attempt to manage the time spent in idle listening (IL) state. The challenge is that the receiver has no knowledge about when the pending data will arrival under end-to-end communication protocols (TCP/IP); therefore each station has to spend more time in IL to wait for the pending data. To address this problem, we propose NDN-PSM, in which NDN communication architecture is leveraged to cut down unnecessary IL time. In particular, we introduce two new power states in NDN-PSM, i.e., light doze and deep doze. As stations can check pending interest table (PIT) information to predict data arrival precisely, they can switch to deep doze or light doze intelligently. The inherent receiver-driven patterns of NDN can make each station effectively go to deep doze state for power saving. We have implemented NDN-PSM in NS-3 through ndnSIM and the simulation results demonstrate that NDN-PSM can effectively reduce IL time as well as total power consumption and meanwhile retain low transmission delay. Specifically, compared to the PSM mechanism, NDN-PSM can reduce the average power consumption up to 56%.