Power is a precious resource in mobile devices, and thus the 802.11 standard provides power-management capabilities that allow 802.11 nodes to minimize the
amount of time that their sense, transmit, and receive functions and other circuitry
need to be “on.” 802.11 power management operates as follows. A node is able to
explicitly alternate between sleep and wake states (not unlike a sleepy student in a
classroom!). A node indicates to the access point that it will be going to sleep by setting the power-management bit in the header of an 802.11 frame to 1. A timer in the
node is then set to wake up the node just before the AP is scheduled to send its beacon frame (recall that an AP typically sends a beacon frame every 100 msec). Since
the AP knows from the set power-transmission bit that the node is going to sleep, it
(the AP) knows that it should not send any frames to that node, and will buffer any
frames destined for the sleeping host for later transmission.
A node will wake up just before the AP sends a beacon frame, and quickly enter
the fully active state (unlike the sleepy student, this wakeup requires only 250
microseconds [Kamerman 1997]!). The beacon frames sent out by the AP contain a
list of nodes whose frames have been buffered at the AP. If there are no buffered
frames for the node, it can go back to sleep. Otherwise, the node can explicitly
6.3 • WIFI: 802.11 WIRELESS LANS 543
request that the buffered frames be sent by sending a polling message to the AP.
With an inter-beacon time of 100 msec, a wakeup time of 250 microseconds, and a
similarly small time to receive a beacon frame and check to ensure that there are no
buffered frames, a node that has no frames to send or receive can be asleep 99% of
the time, resulting in a significant energy savings.