A Location-Aware Energy Saving Mechanism for Dense WLANs

Wenqi SUN  Hewu LI  Jianping WU  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications   Vol.E99-B   No.1   pp.269-279
Publication Date: 2016/01/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1345
DOI: 10.1587/transcom.2015EBP3219
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Terrestrial Wireless Communication/Broadcasting Technologies
Keyword: 
energy saving,  dense WLAN,  power on/off,  user location,  

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Summary: 
WLAN infrastructure has been deployed densely and extensively in the past few years. Since APs are always kept online, a dense WLAN will waste energy during idle hours. In this paper, we first state some principles for powering on/off APs in order to save energy. Then we design an energy saving mechanism correspondingly. The energy saving mechanism includes three processes: clustering APs, estimating user location, and powering on/off APs, which tries to choose appropriate APs being online according to user location information. Results of trace-driven simulation show that our mechanism could achieve about 42% energy conservation. More importantly, our mechanism can provide better network service for users than previous mechanisms which usually ignore user location information.