Paper: PSM-throttling-icnp07.pdf
Slides: PSM-throttling-icnp07-talk.ppt

@Inproceedings{TGCZ07P,
   author = "E. Tan and L. Guo and S. Chen and X. Zhang",
   title = "{PSM-throttling}: Minimizing Energy Consumption for Bulk Data Communications in WLANs",
   booktitle = "Proc. of IEEE ICNP",
   month = "Oct",
   year = "2007"
}

Abstract

While the 802.11 power saving mode (PSM) and
its enhancements can reduce power consumption by putting
the wireless network interface (WNI) into sleep as much as
possible, they either require additional infrastructure support, or
may degrade the transmission throughput and cause additional
transmission delay. These schemes are not suitable for long
and bulk data transmissions with strict QoS requirements on
wireless devices. With increasingly abundant bandwidth available
on the Internet, we have observed that TCP congestion control is
often not a constraint of bulk data transmissions as bandwidth
throttling is widely used in practice.

In this paper, instead of further manipulating the trade-off
between the power saving and the incurred delay, we effectively
explore the power saving potential by considering the bandwidth
throttling on streaming/downloading servers. We propose an
application-independent protocol, called PSM-throttling. With
a quick detection on the TCP flow throughput, a client can
identify bandwidth throttling connections with a low cost. Since
the throttling enables us to reshape the TCP traffic into periodic
bursts with the same average throughput as the server transmission
rate, the client can accurately predict the arriving time of
packets and turn on/off the WNI accordingly. PSM-throttling
can minimize power consumption on TCP-based bulk traffic
by effectively utilizing available Internet bandwidth without
degrading the application's performance perceived by the user.
Furthermore, PSM-throttling is client-centric, and does not need
any additional infrastructure support. Our lab-environment and
Internet-based evaluation results show that PSM-throttling can
effectively improve energy savings (by up to 75%) and/or the QoS
for a broad types of TCP-based applications, including streaming,
pseudo streaming, and large file downloading, over existing PSM-like
methods.