Analyzing Peer Specific Power Saving in IEEE 802.11s Through Queuing Petri Nets: Some Insights and Future Research Directions

The IEEE 802.11s wireless mesh networking standard supports power save mode where a mesh station can switch from the awake state to the doze state when there is no data to transmit. In the standard, the doze state is peer specific and has two different modes of operations—light sleep mode and deep sleep mode. This paper analytically evaluates the performance of a mesh basic service set under the operation of different power save modes, with the help of a queuing petri net modeling. The analytical model gives several insights of the power save mode operations, which are further validated using simulation results as well as results from a practical mesh networking testbed. Our analysis reveals that there exists interesting performance tradeoffs among light sleep mode and deep sleep mode, that can be explored to design an efficient power profile for mesh networks.