Snooze: energy management in 802.11n WLANs

Increasingly, mobile devices equipped with 802.11n interfaces are being used for a wide variety of applications including bandwidth-intensive HD video streaming. Recent work has shown that 802.11n interfaces are power-hungry, so energy management is an important challenge. 802.11n implementations have additional power states relative to earlier generations of 802.11 technology, so energy management challenges for 802.11n are qualitatively different compared to that faced by prior work. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of Snooze, an energy management technique for 802.11n which uses two novel and inter-dependent mechanisms: client micro-sleeps and antenna configuration management . In Snooze, the APmonitors traffic on the WLAN and directs client sleep times and durations as well as antenna configurations, without significantly affecting throughput or delay. Snooze achieves 30~85% energy-savings over CAM across workloads ranging from VoIP and video streaming to file downloads and chats.