Power Management Strategies for Mobile Devices in Wireless Networks

As wireless networks become an integral component of the modern communication infrastructure, energy efficiency will be an important design consideration. Since batteries provide limited power, a general constraint of wireless communication is the short continuous operation time of mobile terminals. Therefore power management is one of the most challenging problems in wireless communication, and recent research has addressed this topic. Basically, IEEE 802.11 introduces a basic idea of power saving mode (PSM). In this paper, a couple of ideas are introduced to save energy in the infrastructure and ad hoc architecture of wireless communications. The first one is the modification of using two different power levels for RTS-CTS and DATA-ACK based on ad hoc network. This modification does not degrade throughput and yields energy saving. The second one is the Bounded Slowdown (BSD) protocol, which is the modification of PSM and based on infrastructure.