Centralized Control over Greening Residential Wi-Fi Networks

With the rapid growth in information and communication technology, reducing energy consumption of residential Wi-Fi networks has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Today’s household equipment are not only limited to traditional devices but also devices for VoIP, health monitoring, security surveillance etc. Wireless access points are always on so as to give continuous online presence to such devices. Also with the continuously growing popularity of Wi-Fi networks, there is a considerable growth in user premises equipment. A typical home gateway comprises a modem; router and wireless access point and such devices consume high per bit energy even in the case of light traffic. A solution for reducing energy consumption in residential Wi-Fi networks is to aggregate all client traffic on some suitable access points and put remaining APs to sleep. In this scheme, a centralized approach is used for reducing energy consumption with the benefits of fairness, no client modification, explicit control of migrations and allowing for heterogeneity amongst households. A central operator takes all the responsibility of minimizing energy consumption and reduces the burden on users.