Power Consumption and Energy Efficiency of 802.11 Network Devices

This paper examines the power consumption of IEEE 802.11standards with distance variations. The effectiveness of each standard is analysed over a small wireless network. Experiments carried out to analyse power consumed by 802.11 standards show that energy consumed during transmission of data is higher than that consumed during reception. Results from experiments carried out show that the power consumption of 802.11n is more than that of 802.11b/g in both transmitting and receiving modes. The results also show that 802.11n standards are more effective especially for data transfer where it doubles the transfer rate of b/g in most cases. To achieve minimum power consumption, the appropriate data rate based on the available standard should be chosen for network implementation. However it is also observed that more power is consumed by the laptop by transmitting and receiving of packets.