Beacon Alignment Synchronization for Increased Scalability of IEEE 802.11s Light Sleep Mode

Abstract:
Whenever wireless mesh networks incorporate user devices as mesh clients, the power save mode becomes of crucial importance. To reduce power consumption on battery-powered Wi-Fi mesh devices, 802.11s introduces flexible power save schemes. Light sleep mode is introduced to provide a tradeoff between energy savings and mesh link performance. To achieve this goal it takes into account additional power consumption for each of a node’s peer links. Thus, it suffers from increased consumption in dense mesh topologies. In this paper we propose a standard-compliant synchronization algorithm to enhance the scalability of the IEEE 802.11s power save schemes. Using testbed measurements and network simulation we compare its performance with respect to the energy efficiency with that of the standard’s synchronization algorithm in the case of an idle network.