A thorough understanding of the power consumption behavior of real world wireless devices is of paramount importance to ground energy-efficient protocols and optimizations on realistic and accurate energy models. This paper provides an in-depth experimental investigation of the per-frame energy consumption components in 802.11 Wireless LAN devices. To the best of our knowledge, our measurements are the first to unveil that a substantial fraction of energy consumption, hereafter descriptively named cross-factor, may be ascribed to each individual frame while it crosses the protocol/implementation stack (OS, driver, NIC). Our findings, summarized in a convenient new energy consumption model, contrast traditional models which either neglect or amortize such energy cost component in a fixed baseline cost, and raise the alert that, in some cases, conclusions drawn using traditional energy models may be fallacious.

Who is Andrés Garcia-Saavedra?

Andres Garcia-Saavedra received his B.Sc. in Telecommunications Engineering from Universidad of Cantabria in 2009, and his M.Sc. in Telematics Engineering from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) in 2010. Currently he holds the position of Teaching Assistant and pursues his Ph.D. in the Telematics Department of UC3M. His research interests are wireless communications: WiFi, 802.11, Resources allocation, energy efficiency, MAC protocols, new architectures for cellular networks.

Andres’s personal site

Authors: Andrés Garcia-Saavedra, Pablo Serrano, Albert Banchs, Giuseppe Bianchi

This event will be conducted in English