An Adaptive Power Saving Mechanism in IEEE 802.11 Networks to Support IP Paging Protocol

Terminal paging is a procedure to locate a called mobile host (MH), which registered only approximated location information. The paging aims to reduce signalling overhead and power consumption in the MH. Recently, IP paging protocol has been widely designed for the terminal paging in IP-based mobile networks. However, since any power save mechanism is not supported in IP layer by itself, it is difficult to obtain the optimized power consumption effects. In other words, IP paging protocol should be cooperated with the power save mechanism supported in link layers. In this paper, we propose a new power saving mechanism in IEEE 802.11 networks in order to efficiently integrate with IP paging protocol. Unlike the existing power saving mechanism, the proposed power saving mechanism adaptively adjusts the wake-up interval by estimating the future idle time of MH based on the previous patterns. In terms of performance evaluation, we formulated and compared the total cost, incurred in the IP paging protocol deployed over the power saving mechanism, when the existing scheme, the proposed scheme, and the optimum scheme are used. As a result, the proposed adaptive power saving mechanism is more close to the optimum solution than the current power saving mechanism.