Design and Simulation of Power-Aware Scheduling Strategies of Streaming Data in Wireless LANs

One of the major concern for 802.11b wireless local area network is energy efficiency. In fact, mobile devices spend a large amount of power on their radio interface for accessing multimedia services such as audio and video streaming.In this work we address the problem of energy-aware scheduling of treaming data provided by a single server to multiple clients. We propose both open-loop and closed-loop strategies that exploit application level information to perform energy-effiocient traffic reshaping.We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed trategies by means of accurate power/performance imulations performed on top of Mathworks' Simulink. System component are modeled as generalized semi-markov processes (GSMPs) and characterized by mean of real-world measurements. In particular, the timing and power behavior of wireless network interface cards is accurately captured in order to evaluate the impact of power management strategies on a wireless 802.11b link. Experimental result how that up to 75%of the communication energy can be aved by mean of power-aware traffic scheduling with negligible user-perceived performance degradation.