CrowdAP: Crowdsourcing driven AP coordination for improving energy efficiency in wireless access networks

摘要

Internet access via wireless hotspots is an ever increasing demand with the inception of smart cities, where most of the users connect the Internet with their WiFi enabled devices. A set of wireless devices forms a basic service set (BSS) connected to an access point (AP). However, large number of APs are deployed in the form of extended service set (ESS) to balance the traffic load and to provide seamless data connectivity. Recent studies show that in a public WiFi hotspot, a mobile device remains in the overlapping region of multiple APs. Due to geographically sparse distributions of mobile devices, an AP may need to keep its interfaces on to serve only a few devices which otherwise can be shifted to another active AP. In this paper, we develop CrowdAP, an energy balancing AP coordination mechanism; where the minimum number of APs are computed such that the underlying mobile devices can be served without any degradation in performance, while the rest of the APs can go to the sleep state to save power. We analyze the performance of CrowdAP through simulation as well as from testbed, and show that it is able to save significant energy in the network.