Practical issues of power control in IEEE 802.11 wireless devices

Power control techniques for IEEE 802.11 wireless networks have already gained much attention. Such techniques are particularly attractive because they can improve various aspects of wireless network operation such as interference mitigation, spatial reuse in dense wireless deployments, topology control, and link quality enhancement. However, until recently implementing such advanced power control using off-the-shelf wireless devices was not considered possible. For example, Abdesslem et al. [1] stated that ldquomany novel power control solutions cannot be efficiently implemented over existing IEEE 802.11 cardsrdquo. However, in this paper we demonstrate that power control is now feasible and can be implemented in current IEEE 802.11 cards with per-packet granularity and low power switching latency.