A Sleeping and Offloading Optimization Scheme for Energy-Efficient WLANs

In this letter, we propose an access point (AP) sleeping and user offloading optimization scheme to improve energy efficiency in densely deployed WLANs. Through real trace analysis, we investigate AP energy efficiency to obtain the sleep-awake threshold, which is used to select sleep or awake APs according to real-time status information monitored on controller. Moreover, we formulate the user offloading problem as a reverse auction process to optimize energy efficiency of APs involved in offloading. Simulation results demonstrate that, comparing to traditional methods, our scheme can achieve up to 20% energy saving while maintaining effective system coverage and throughput.