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Avoiding the rush hours: WiFi energy management via traffic isolation

Published: 28 June 2011 Publication History

Abstract

WiFi continues to be a prime source of energy consumption in mobile devices. This paper observes that, despite a rich body of research in WiFi energy management, there is room for improvement. Our key finding is that WiFi energy optimizations have conventionally been designed with a single AP in mind. However, network contention among different APs can dramatically increase a client's energy consumption. Each client may have to keep awake for long durations before its own AP gets a chance to send packets to it. As the AP density increases in the vicinity, the waiting time inflates, resulting in a proportional decrease in battery life.
We design SleepWell, a system that achieves energy efficiency by evading network contention. The APs regulate the sleeping window of their clients in a way that different APs are active/inactive during non-overlapping time windows. The solution is analogous to the common wisdom of going late to office and coming back late, thereby avoiding the rush hours. We implement SleepWell on a testbed of 8 Laptops and 9 Android phones, and evaluate it over a wide variety of scenarios and traffic patterns (YouTube, Pandora, FTP, Internet radio, and mixed). Results show a median gain of up to 2x when WiFi links are strong; when links are weak and the network density is high, the gains can be even more. We believe SleepWell is a desirable upgrade to WiFi systems, especially in light of increasing WiFi density.

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  • (2022)EAPS: Edge-Assisted Predictive Sleep Scheduling for 802.11 IoT StationsIEEE Systems Journal10.1109/JSYST.2021.306392216:1(591-602)Online publication date: Mar-2022
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      cover image ACM Conferences
      MobiSys '11: Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services
      June 2011
      430 pages
      ISBN:9781450306430
      DOI:10.1145/1999995
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 28 June 2011

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      Author Tags

      1. 802.11
      2. AP
      3. PSM
      4. WLAN
      5. beacon
      6. contention
      7. scheduling

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      • (2022)EAPS: Edge-Assisted Predictive Sleep Scheduling for 802.11 IoT StationsIEEE Systems Journal10.1109/JSYST.2021.306392216:1(591-602)Online publication date: Mar-2022
      • (2021)A Systematic Review on Software Robustness AssessmentACM Computing Surveys10.1145/344897754:4(1-65)Online publication date: 3-May-2021
      • (2021)Application Layer Denial-of-Service Attacks and Defense MechanismsACM Computing Surveys10.1145/344829154:4(1-33)Online publication date: 3-May-2021
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