Abstract
Battery-powered mobile routers must control their power consumption to extend their operating time. The mobile routers have both a wide area network (WAN) interface and a local area network (LAN) interface. Of the two interfaces, the LAN interface operated as a wireless LAN (WLAN) access point (AP) does not have a power-saving function in the IEEE 802.11 standard. Therefore, we focus on reducing power consumption of the AP. The conventional method for saving power in APs concerns the MAC queue status. The mobile routers, however, have Layer 3 functionality. That is, IP frames are transferred from the WAN interface to the LAN interface. To save power, the departure process from the Layer 3 queue to MAC queue needs to be modified. In this paper, we propose a departure control from the Layer 3 queue to save power in the WLAN AP. The numerical analysis and simulation results revealed that the proposed method reduces power compared with the conventional method.
