Life-Add: Lifetime Adjustable Design for WiFi Networks with Heterogeneous Energy Supplies

TL;DR

Life-Add is a novel WiFi network design that adjusts device sleep times to extend battery life, improve throughput, and ensure fairness, especially in heterogeneous energy supply scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a lifetime adjustable WiFi protocol that balances energy consumption and performance, handling multiple energy sources and network challenges.

Findings

Achieves near-optimal proportional-fair utility in single AP scenarios.

Alleviates near-far and hidden terminal issues in multi-AP scenarios.

Enhances lifetime, throughput, and fairness in WiFi networks through ns-3 simulations.

Abstract

WiFi usage significantly reduces the battery lifetime of handheld devices such as smartphones and tablets, due to its high energy consumption. In this paper, we propose "Life-Add": a Lifetime Adjustable design for WiFi networks, where the devices are powered by battery, electric power, and/or renewable energy. In Life-Add, a device turns off its radio to save energy when the channel is sensed to be busy, and sleeps for a random time period before sensing the channel again. Life-Add carefully controls the devices' average sleep periods to improve their throughput while satisfying their operation time requirement. It is proven that Life-Add achieves near-optimal proportional-fair utility performance for single access point (AP) scenarios. Moreover, Life-Add alleviates the near-far effect and hidden terminal problem in general multiple AP scenarios. Our ns-3 simulations show that Life-Add simultaneously improves the lifetime, throughput, and fairness performance of WiFi networks, and coexists harmoniously with IEEE 802.11.