Power-saving mechanisms in emerging standards for wireless LANs: the MAC level perspective

This article provides an overview of mechanisms used for power saving in the upcoming standards for wireless LANs: IEEE 802.11 and ETSI RES 10 HIPERLAN. Power saving on the MAC level is addressed by these standards in a quite different way. We outline the main features of the mechanisms in both standards in terms of power saving. In addition we present simulation studies of the power-saving mechanism in ad hoc configurations of IEEE 802.11 networks, which demonstrate the optimization potential and some performance trade-offs quantitatively.