Experimental evaluation and comparative study on energy efficiency of the evolving IEEE 802.11 standards

Abstract

Over the last decade, the IEEE 802.11 has emerged as the most popular protocol in the wireless domain. Since the release of the first standard version, several amendments have been introduced in an effort to improve its throughput performance, with the most recent one being the IEEE 802.11n extension. In this paper, we present experimentally obtained results that evaluate the energy efficiency of the base standard in comparison with the latest 802.11n version, under a wide range of settings. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to provide such a detailed comparative analysis on the performance of both standards. The followed power measurement methodology is based on custom-built hardware that enables online energy consumption evaluation at both the wireless transceiver and the total node levels. Based on in-depth interpretation of the collected results, we remark that the latest standard enables significant improvement of energy efficiency, when combined with standard compliant frame aggregation mechanisms. Our detailed findings can act as guidelines for researchers working on the design of energy efficient wireless protocols.