Design and Performance Evaluation of an Energy-Aware Scheduling Framework for Mobile WiMAX

摘要

Power saving is an important feature of mobile Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) systems, since it allows user terminals to switch off the radio transceiver when there is no network activity, thus increasing the battery lifetime. In this paper, it is shown that even greater energy savings can be obtained if user terminals are put to sleep while there is network activity, by trading off performance for battery duration in a controllable way. To this aim, a framework is proposed, in which existing wireless scheduling algorithms can be fit to pursue their original goals, e.g., maximizing throughput or fairness, while improving the energy efficiency of user terminals. The framework is specifically tailored to the IEEE 802.16/WiMAX technology. Its effectiveness is assessed in this context through an extensive packet-level simulation campaign with realistic FTP data traffic.