Evolution of IEEE 802.11 compatible standards and impact on Energy Consumption

TL;DR

This paper evaluates how IEEE 802.11 standards, especially 802.11n, have evolved to significantly reduce energy consumption in wireless devices through experimental measurements and MAC layer enhancements.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed experimental comparison of energy efficiency between the original IEEE 802.11 standard and the 802.11n extension, including the impact of MAC layer improvements.

Findings

802.11n reduces energy consumption by over 75% with frame aggregation.

MAC layer enhancements significantly improve energy efficiency.

Experimental results cover a wide range of settings.

Abstract

Over the last decade, the IEEE 802.11 has emerged as the most popular protocol in the wireless domain. Since the release of the first standard version, several amendments have been introduced in an effort to improve its throughput performance, with the most recent one being the IEEE 802.11n extension. In this work, we present detailed experimentally obtained measurements that evaluate the energy efficiency of the base standard in comparison with the latest 802.11n version. Moreover, we investigate the impact of various MAC layer enhancements, both vendor specific and standard compliant ones, on the energy consumption of wireless transceivers and total nodes as well. Results obtained under a wide range of settings, indicate that the latest standard enables reduction of energy expenditure, by more than 75%, when combined with innovative frame aggregation mechanisms.