A novel idle mode operation in IEEE 802.11 WLANs

Abstract

IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) became a prevailing technology for the broadband wireless Internet access, and new applications such as Voice over WLAN (VoWLAN) are fast emerging today. For the battery-powered VoWLAN devices, the standby time extension is a key concern for the market acceptance while today's 802.11 is not optimized for such an operation. In this paper, we propose a novel Idle Mode operation, which comprises paging, idle hando®, and delayed hando®. Under the idle mode operation, a Mobile Host (MH) does not need to perform a hando® within a predefined Paging Area (PA). Only when the MH enters a new PA, an idle hando® is performed with a minimum level of signaling. Due to the absence of such an idle mode operation, both IP paging and Power Saving Mode (PSM) have been considered the alternatives so far even though they are not efficient approaches. We implement our proposed scheme in order to prove the feasibility. The implemented prototype demonstrates that the proposed scheme outperforms the legacy alternatives with respect to energy consumption, thus extending the standby time.