Utilizing Communication Air-Time to Reduce Energy Consumption of Access Points

With the advancement of communication technologies, network densification, the number of connected devices, and high-demand throughput applications are increasing as well. As such communication networks are becoming power-hungry increasing the need for new power resources to support them. To reduce the impact on the environment such power-hungry networks either should be powered by renewable power resources or should be able to harvest the energy locally, or reduce the energy consumption by improving communication design. Access points (AP) are one of the network elements that are highly distributed and where energy consumption can be reduced with better design and communication models. In this paper, we propose a new method that utilizes unused time periods in active communication to allow an AP to go on idle mode without exceeding the traffic latency bounds or affecting the packet loss ratio. To simulate the scenarios, we used ns-3 system-level simulator. The presented results demonstrate the possibility of energy savings that is proportional to the AP standby time, and in some cases, it can go up to 90% compared to the energy consumption of normal operation. In addition, the energy savings are calculated for some commercial APs to see how much energy can be saved by utilizing the proposed method.