A Proposal of Transmission Power Minimization Extension in Active Access-Point Configuration Algorithm for Elastic Wireless Local-Area Network System

Abstract

Nowadays, the wireless local-area network (WLAN) has become common in the low-cost Internet access solution using wireless communications between access points (APs) and hosts. In WLAN, traffic demands from users tend to fluctuate according to day and time. To minimize the power consumption of active APs, we have studied the elastic WLAN system and implemented the testbed using Raspberry Pi for the AP. Also, the active AP configuration algorithm has been proposed to optimize the active AP configuration with channel assignments and host associations for the elastic WLAN system. In this paper, we propose the transmission power minimization extension in the active AP configuration algorithm to further minimize the power consumption. After the previous algorithm is applied with the maximum transmission power, it minimizes the power of each active AP such that it satisfies the minimum throughput constraint. The effectiveness of our proposal is verified through simulations using the WIMNET simulator and experiments using the testbed in several network scenarios.