Cooperative Energy-Efficient Management of Federated WiFi Networks

Abstract

The proliferation of overlapping, always-on IEEE 802.11 Access Points (APs) in urban areas can cause inefficient bandwidth usage and energy waste. Cooperation among APs could address these problems by allowing underused devices to hand over their wireless stations to nearby APs and temporarily switch off, while avoiding to overload a BSS and thus offloading congested APs. The federated house model provides an appealing backdrop to implement cooperation among APs. In this paper, we outline a distributed framework that assumes the presence of a multipurpose gateway with AP capabilities in every household. Our framework allows cooperation through the monitoring of local wireless resources and the triggering of offloading requests toward other federated gateways. Our simulation results show that, in realistic residential settings, the proposed framework yields an energy saving between 45% and 86% under typical usage patterns, while avoiding congestion and meeting user expectations in terms of throughput. Furthermore, we show the feasibility and the benefits of our framework with a real test-bed deployed on commodity hardware.

Energy efficiency in multicast multihop D2D networks

“…Offloading cellular networks is highly attracting attention in recent years by either migrating to new network topologies or developing enhancement techniques of current cellular networks to accommodate more subscribers with higher data rates [1]- [8]. A number of cellular offloading techniques have been proposed in the literature, such as switching to femtocells [9], [10] or Wi-Fi networks [3], [11]. These techniques have a range of advantages including low cost, standardized interface and high quality of services.…”