Delay-aware Power Saving Mechanism for 802.11 Wireless LANs via NDN

Abstract

Idle listening (IL) is the major source of power consumption in Wi-Fi interface for mobile station. The reason is that station (STA) does not know when there would be data for it and it has to stay in IL to wait for the data. With the advantages of named data networking, this problem can be solved well, However, stations may have different requirements on delay, the existing power saving mechanism lacks consideration of delay. In order to improve the quality of service (QoS), we apply an innovative network architecture of NDN and mark the real-time requirements of stations in the Interest packets using a flag bit. And we use a priority sending queue to further reduce the latency of the delay-sensitive packets. The requirements of delay and energy efficiency can be satisfied with different settings of the flag bit. The simulation results show that the proposal can reduce the average delay up to 20% compared with the power saving mode in NDN and gain the commendable energy efficiency.