Energy Efficient Schedulers in Wireless Networks: Design and Optimization

Minimizing energy consumption is crucial for portable wireless stations because they operate on a limited battery supply. For example, the IEEE 802.11 standard includes a mechanism called power-saving mode (PSM), which allows a network interface on a mobile station to enter a sleep state whenever possible to reduce its energy consumption. We consider a generic wireless system composed of an access point (AP) and several stations that offer a PSM to its users. Our PSM is AP-centric (i.e., gives control to the AP) to save more energy. We formulate a downlink scheduling optimization problem aimed at saving energy and propose two heuristic scheduling policies to solve it. One of these policies is non-work-conserving, and it offers an interesting tradeoff between energy consumption and user performance. We also study and show how the length of the Beacon Period (BP) has a significant impact on the energy and the delay performance of wireless stations. For each of our two scheduling policies, we derive simple approximate formulas for the length of the BP that minimizes the energy consumption and for the relationship between the delay performance and the length of the BP. Assuming the maximum allowable average packet delay is given by the users as a QoS requirement, we illustrate how to dimension the length of the BP for the two schedulers we have proposed and show that we can achieve significant energy savings while meeting the delay constraint with the non-work conserving one in many cases. Extensive simulations show that a fine-tuning of the length of the BP as well as well-designed scheduling disciplines is essential to saving energy in wireless stations. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]