Exploiting idle communication power to improve wireless network performance and energy efficiency

As a family of wireless local area network (WLAN) protocols between physical layer and higher-layer protocols, IEEE 802.11 has to accommodate the features and requirements of both ends. However, current practice has addressed the problems separately and is far from being satisfactory. On one end, due to varying channel conditions, WLANs have to provide multiple data channel rates to support various signal qualities. A low channel rate station not only suffers low throughput, but also significantly degrades the throughput of other stations. On the other end, TCP is not energy efficient running on 802.11. In a TCP session, a wireless network interface (WNI) has to stay awake to generate timely acknowledgments, and hence, the energy is wasted by channel listening during idle awake time. In this paper, considering the needs of both ends, we utilize the idle communication power of the WNI to improve the throughput and energy efficiency of stations in WLANs with multiple channel rates. We characterize the energy efficiency as energy per bit, instead of energy per second. Based on modeling and analysis, we propose a data forwarding mechanism and an energy-aware channel allocation mechanism. In such a system, a high channel rate station relays data frames between its neighboring stations with low channel rates and the Access Point, improving their throughput and energy efficiency. Different from traditional relaying approaches, our scheme compensates for the energy consumption for data forwarding. The forwarding station obtains additional channel access time from its beneficiaries, leading to the increase of its own throughput without compromising its energy efficiency. We implement a prototype of our proposed system and evaluate it through extensive experiments. Our results show significant performance improvements for both low and high channel rate stations.