A Testbed Evaluation of the Scalability of IEEE 802.11s Light Sleep Mode

Abstract

Abstract. Wireless mesh networkshave not yet made their breakthrough in consumer electronics, although they are well suited for use in home or on-thego environments. Especially IEEE 802.11s is ideal for multimedia sharing on handheld devices as it uses regular Wi-Fi hardware, but provides connectivity without requiring an access point. To maintain proper battery runtime on mobile devices 802.11s introduces new power save schemes. Despite the increased complexity due to the meshed connectivity, these schemes allow efficient energy saving for the mesh nodes. In this paper we present a testbed implementation of the IEEE 802.11s power save schemes on off-the-shelf hardware and assess their effects on current consumption for the idle network case in detail.