This paper proposes a power saving control method for battery-powered portable wireless LAN (WLAN) access points (APs) in an overlapping basic service set (OBSS) environment. The IEEE802.11 standard does not support power saving control for APs. Some conventional power saving control methods for APs have been proposed that use the network allocation vector (NAV) to inhibit transmission at stations (STAs) while the AP is sleeping. However, since with these approaches the actual beacon interval in the OBSS environment may be extended due to the NAV as compared to the beacon interval which is set at the AP, the power consumption and delay may be increased as compared to a single BSS unaffected by interference from neighboring APs. To overcome this problem, this paper introduces a new action frame named power saving access point (PSAP) action frame which the AP uses to inform STAs within its BSS about the AP\u27s sleep length. In addition, a function of the PSAP action frame is that STAs enter the sleep state after receiving the PSAP action frame. The proposed control method avoids the postponement of beacon transmission and reduces the power consumption in an OBSS environment, as compared to the conventional control method. Numerical analysis and computer simulation reveal that the newly proposed control method conserves power as compared to the conventional control method. The proposed control method achieves the minimum consumed power ratio at the AP, which is 44% as compared to the standard, when the beacon interval is 100 ms and the sleep length is 60 ms, even if the number of neighboring APs in an OBSS environment is increased.
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