Abstract:

In order to reveal the energy-consumption performance of IEEE 802.1 1 DCF(Distributed Coordination Function)in a saturated wireless LAN environment,both the average energy consumption and the average system time of the node in each virtual slot are calculated according to the corresponding transmission probability and con-ditional collision probability of the node.The power consumption of the node and the goodput energy-consumption rate of the network are thus obtained.Analytical results show that,(1)the longer the packet and the higher the channel rate,the lower the goodput energy -consumption rate which means a better energy-consumption perfor-mance;(2)there exists a near-linear relationship between the goodput energy-consumption rate and the network size;(3)the basic access mechanism becomes better than the RTS/CTS access mechanism at an increasing chan-nel rate;and(4)the average power consumption of the node is mainly determined by the received power consump-tion when the network size is large enough,but rarely affected by the transmitted and idle power consumptions.

Key words: wireless LAN, 802.1 1 DCF, energy consumption, goodput energy-consumption rate, virtual slot