Analysis of the impact of background traffic on the performance of 802.11 power saving mechanism

In our previous work, we have identified the issue that the performance of 802.11 power saving mechanism degrades significantly with the presence of background traffic. In this letter, we propose a simple model to theoretically analyze the impact of background streams on the power performance of an individual mobile station in power saving mode (PSM). By reasonable assumptions on medium access details, we develop a set of mathematical formulas which gives the ratio of prolonged data retrieval time under condition of background traffic within a beacon period. Simulation results demonstrate the validity of the proposed model for analysis of 802.11 PSM.