A Survey of Energy Efficient MAC Protocols for IEEE 802.11 WLAN

In recent years, IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) have been widely deployed, and more and more mobile devices have built-in WLAN interfaces. However, WLAN employs the Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol, which consumes a significant portion of the energy resources of a mobile device. Hence, minimizing the energy consumption of the WLAN interface in mobile devices has recently attracted considerable interest in both academia and industry. This paper provides a survey and an experimental study of the energy consumption issues and energy-efficient technologies of the MAC protocol in IEEE 802.11 WLAN.