Analysing the energy consumption behaviour of WiFi networks

The continuous increase in the energy production cost, together with environmental sustainability issues, is leading research communities, governments and industries to focus their efforts on a reduction of the global CO₂ footprint. Information and communication technologies, which represent the nervous system of the globalized economy and society, account for a significant percentage of the overall global energy consumption. While a number of solutions have been proposed to build new, energy-aware and `green' communication infrastructures, little attention has been devoted to measuring the actual impact through real-world measurements. In this paper, we focus on wireless access networks, and aim at experimentally investigating the fundamental relationship between traffic and power consumption for a typical wireless LAN based on the IEEE 802.11g standard. The insight obtained through the measurements can be used to develop reliable and realistic energy consumption models, on top of which novel energy aware protocols and algorithms can be designed and developed.

I. Introduction

In the quest for enabling a low-carbon and sustainable economy and society, information and communication technologies (ICT) is playing a twofold role. On the one hand, advanced ICT enables to increase the efficiency in a number of industrial sectors (e.g., smart grids), thereby achieving significant reduction in the associated power consumption. At the same time, ICT itself is a major source of CO₂emissions. Several studies have shown that the ICT sector is responsible for an estimated 2% - 10% of the global energy consumption [1], [2], [3]. Additionally, ICT sector also produces from 2% to 3% of total emissions of greenhouse gases [4], [5], [6].