An Energy-Efficiency MAC-Layer Relay Method for IEEE 802.11 Infrastructure Wireless LANs

摘要

In this paper, we introduce Energy-Efficiency Cut-Through (ECTP) protocol to improve energy-efficiency in infrastructure wireless LANs. We study a combined medium access and next-hop address lookup without the intervention of the host protocol stack, and introduce a proper relay node to let a pair of communication ends adopt a higher data rate according to the path loss and the channel condition at transmission time. Evaluation results show that the proposed protocol and its degraded method provide significant improvements on energy-efficiency, and remarkably enhance overall system performance.