Efficient Approach for Energy Saving using Multihop Nodes for Portable Devices

One of the most widely used wireless communication standards is a Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) (IEEE 802.11). However, WLAN has a serious power consumption problem. In the paper, a novel energy saving approach is proposed that exploits the multiradio feature of recent mobile devices equipped with WLAN and Bluetooth interfaces. The work is based on clustering. In the work, a cluster is a Bluetooth Personal Area Network (PAN), which consists of one cluster head and several regular nodes. The cluster head acts as a gateway between the PAN and the WLAN, enabling the regular nodes to access the WLAN infrastructure via low-power Bluetooth. The paper presents a distributed clustering protocol, Cooperative Networking protocol (CONET), which dynamically reforms clusters according to each node's bandwidth requirement, energy use, and application type. Unlike existing, the new approach also works for multi-hop clustering also.