A Power-Saving Multi-Radio Multi-Channel MAC Protocol for Wireless Local Area Networks

Abstract

Opportunistic spectrum access and adaptive power management are effective techniques to improve throughput, delay performance, and energy efficiency for wireless networks. In this paper, we consider the joint design of opportunistic spectrum access and adaptive power management under the setting of multi-radio nodes and multi-channel wireless local area networks (WLANs) under the distributed coordination function (DCF) mode. This design problem is particularly challenging due to the conflicting nature of the multi-radio capability of a node, i.e., multiple radios improve throughput and delay performance at the cost of increased energy consumption. To address this problem, we propose a power-saving multi-channel MAC protocol (PSM-MMAC), which is capable of reducing the collision probability and the waiting time in the ‘awake’ state of a node, resulting in improved throughput, delay performance, and energy efficiency. The key ideas of PSM-MMAC are the following: we first estimate the number of active links; given this estimation as well as queue lengths and channel conditions, we appropriately select channels, radios, and power states (i.e., awake or doze state); then we optimize the medium access probability in p-persistent CSMA used in the data exchange. Another contribution of this paper is an analytical model that characterizes the throughput performance. Simulation results validate the accuracy of our analytical model and show that our proposed protocol is able to significantly improve both throughput and energy efficiency.