Modelling the impact of interference on the energy efficiency of WLANs

The high-bandwidth demands from variety of applications drive a dense wireless local access network (WLAN), which results in a complicated wireless network scene with serious co-channel interference and energy waste. In this paper, to reveal the interactions between interference and energy efficiency, we propose an interference-energy efficiency (IFEE) model to quantify the interference impact on the energy efficiency of 802.11 access point (AP) devices. Firstly, we introduce the channel separation and the difference of received signal strength indication (D-RSSI) as two indicators to extend the classical signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) notion and rate adaptive mechanism. Then, these two parameters are integrated into the energy consumption model to establish the IFEE model. Lastly, we conduct extensive measurements with five typical WiFi interference scene in real network to validate the effectiveness of our model. The comparisons between simulation results and real data demonstrate that the proposed IFEE model can quantify the interference and energy efficiency with high accuracy, which can be used for wireless network optimization and protocol design.