Hardware Mechanism for Energy Saving in WiFi Access Points

Abstract

Wireless fidelity (WiFi) networks are deployed in several varied environments all around the World. Usually, the wireless fidelity access points are always on in houses and other small companies. In buildings of large companies and public organizations and in university campuses the number of access points is elevated; they are powered using power over the ethernet and are always on. Consequently, they consume a considerable amount of electric energy. The last versions of the International Electric and Electronic Engineers 802.11 standardized procedures to save energy in a wireless fidelity terminal but not in the access point. We designed a formal method to show when energy can be saved in wireless fidelity access points considering different power supplies for the access point: an electric energy battery and a standard voltage supply. We use an external battery that stores electric energy during an interval of time from a standard voltage supply (Charge period). After that interval (Discharge period), the energy supply for the access point is the external battery. Those intervals of time are repeated sequentially (Charge and Discharge cycles). We verified our formal model implementing a hardware circuit that controls the power supply for the access point. The amount of energy saving for a large number of of access points during a long period of time is considerably high.

A novel energy-saving method for campus wired and dense WiFi network applying machine learning and idle cycling techniques

“…Benhamaid et al (2022) and Qu (2022) proposed routing protocols that reroute network traffic and turn off inactive wireless terminals to increase energy savings (Jimenez et al 2019;Marrero et al 2019;Dhandapani et al 2022). García Baquerizo et al (2019) proposed the use of an Arduino-based electronic circuit to control the dual power supply of WiFi APs: using a traditional via wall socket (alternating current) and a battery (direct current). The objective is to control the efficient charging and discharging of the battery to optimize energy savings.…”

“…A cyclic interval scheduling technique for data transmission in sensor networks is proposed in Tripathi et al (2022), but it cannot be directly applied to dense WiFi networks. In our previous work, we applied that technique to optimize the energy consumption of APs using a battery to efficiently obtain energy savings (García García Baquerizo et al 2019). The recent success of machine learning has led some authors to explore its use in energy savings in APs combined with idle cycling (Fang et al 2018;Yang et al 2023), which in general affects network availability.…”

Research on the Effectiveness Energy Saving Mechanisms in Mobile Networks when Using the Wi-Fi Radio Interface

“…The analyzes carried out showed [2,6,7] that research into the efficiency of the functioning wireless networks of the IEEE 802.11 standard is necessary to take into account the arbitrary load mode in the communication network, with saturated and unsaturated states and the influence of different sources interference [1,8,9,10].…”

“…To exchange data, the access point in the Wi-Fi system sends a special wake-up frame to the station using the WUR interface, after receiving which, the station turns on the main radio interface, and after exchanging frames turns it off. Note that the WUR interface can either be active all the time or be turned off periodically, similar to the main radio interface for even greater energy savings [2,5,8].…”