Modified Power Save Model for Better Energy Efficiency and Reduced Packet Latency

Abstract

Devices constituting wireless ad-hoc networks generally operate in battery power, energy efficiency is a critical research issue. IEEE 802.11 Power Save Mode is a standard recommended for energy efficient operation of wireless ad-hoc networks. When there is no data to transfer, energy is still utilized by IEEE 802.11 PSM during the ATIM window. With this work, an attempt is made to address this drawback with the proposal of a variation in the PSM. Using IEEE 802.11 PSM, each frame travels only one hop during a beacon interval, leading to huge end to end latency and energy consumption. This issue is also addressed and history based prediction method is proposed. According to this method, a data frame can travel many hops from source to destination within a beacon interval. Simulation results using Network Simulator 2 (NS-2) show that the proposed method outperforms IEEE 802.11 PSM with respect to energy efficiency and end to end latency.