Analysis and Comparison between the Energy Efficiency of HT and Non-HT MAC in 802.11n

In order to be compatible with the legacy 802.11, there are two major MAC behaviors, High-throughput (HT) and non-high throughput (non-HT) in the 802.11n. In this paper, we analyze and compare the energy efficiencies of different MAC behaviors in 802.11n based on the Bianchi model and our previous works [6] to evaluate the performance of the different MAC behaviors regarding HT and non-HT. Studies show that owing to the large power consumption in HT, it is not suitable for limited power devices to carry WWW traffics by MIMO transmissions. However, if large file transmissions by FTP are considered, the energy efficiency in HT MAC can be very high due to the large aggregated frame size. It is especially true when the number of active stations is large. Our works can indicate the mobile devices with limited battery endurance to reduce the energy consumption by the decision to enable HT mode or not for the transmission of data frames based on the cross-layer integration.