The limited energy stored in the battery-operated mobile equipment leads to the development of protocols that preserve it as much as possible. Existing MAC protocols for wireless communications, such as GSM, IEEE 802.11, and HIPERLAN, allow the mobile terminals to operate in different power-saving modes. We briefly present the case for the existing radio LAN, describe the WATM MAC protocol, and introduce a power-saving mechanism for the protocol. We also investigate the effect of this power-saving feature on each of the services that are being supported over the radio environment. Finally, we present the power-saving gain obtained with this approach, and the buffer requirements at the access point (a centralised topology is assumed).
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