Energy saving mechanisms on high communication layers

With the large deployment of interconnected objects and systems, energy consumed by computing equipment is becoming more and more important, and saving energy consumption, particularly at the network layer, becomes a very pertinent issue. Energy saving solutions are generally considered at low communication layers; however, higher layers, typically transport and application ones, have not only an important impact on energy consumption, but also can negatively influence the energy saving mechanisms applied at lower MAC and physical levels. In this context, we propose two energy saving mechanisms for the transport and application layers of the Internet stack. The first one consists in an improvement of a classical but not well-known mechanism aimed at maintaining opened transport level connections. The second one is related to the adaptation of the qos offered to multimedia applications in order to minimize energy requirements of underlying layers. NS-3 simulation results show the benefits of each mechanism.