Energy-Aware Contention-Addressing Algorithm in WLAN Wake-Up-Based Radio Network Uplink

The increased relevance of WLAN in upcoming wireless technology has made the efficient design of WLAN medium access control an open issue of concern especially in terms of energy. Energy efficiency primarily focuses on carrier sensing, false wake-ups, collision, and number of contention rounds. Research has proposed the use of low-power wake-up radio to perform carrier sensing operation which has the potential of making WLAN to have more energy and time for data transfer. However, the reduction of false wake-up and collision is still areas that consume node energy if not properly designed especially when contending stations are much. This work proposes an IEEE 802.11 wake-up radio algorithm for uplink that employs a hybrid contention-addressing to enhance energy in WLANs. Unlike other methods, the algorithm makes use of a distributed contention strategy to determine which station can wake up for data communication. Contention rounds are used to determine and queue up a set of stations chosen to transmit data. The algorithm greatly reduces false wake-ups which arise from delay between sleep and wake-up, by broadcasting the ACK frame after modulating the frame with a wake-up message (WuM), piggybacking the address of the next station to transmit. Simulation results show that the HCA–CSAM/CA algorithm is able to reduce energy overhead by 97%, which translates to 60 h increase in battery lifetime and 68.3% reduction in latency as compared with ESOC.