Green network communication has recently received attention because of its economic and environmentally friendly benefits. Energy consumption significantly affects mobile subscriber stations in wireless broadband access networks. Efficient energy saving is an important and challenging issue because all mobile stations are powered by limited battery lifetimes. The IEEE 802.16e standard adopts the sleep mode operation for energy saving with three important parameters: idle threshold, initial sleep window and final sleep window. Adaptively adjusting these parameters to improve energy-efficient communication is an open research topic. This paper proposes a battery lifetime-aware energy-saving mechanism to adaptively adjust three sleep mode parameters for mobile stations and extend batteries lives. The new mechanism considers effect factors, including residual battery lifetime and traffic load on mobile stations. Analytical sleep mode operation models were explored in this work. Our proposed mechanism was examined with a computer simulation using QualNet. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism outperforms the IEEE 802.16e standard in the average lives of mobile stations, improving them by up to 30.08% with little increase in the average waiting delay.
INTRODUCTIONGreen network communication has recently received much attention because of its significant properties, which offer important economic and environmentally friendly benefits. Gradual energy scarcity and the impact of global warming on the environment are inevitable. To address the need of reducing carbon dioxide emission for energy generation, people are finding solutions to reduce energy consumption and improve the energy-saving efficiency in network communication. The trade-off between saving energy and efficient network communication is a subtle research issue in green wireless communication [1]. Moreover, efficiently utilizing limited network resources, including network bandwidths, battery energy and network devices capacity in wireless networks, greatly affects the performance of energy-efficient networks. Cross-layer approaches to green networks are increasingly proposed, addressing energy consumption minimization, power management, network management (handover and mobility management) and practical implementations [2]. Medium access protocols in wireless sensor networks were modified to reduce energy consumption due to transmission channel contention with guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) [3]. Reservation-based bandwidth polling mechanisms and an adaptive scheduling strategy were designed to optimize scarce network resource management [4,5]. In the network layer, energy-efficient routing protocols in wireless ad hoc networks were widely studied to