WakeonWLAN

• Nilesh Mishra, Department of CSE, Indian Institute of Technology, India
• Kameswari Chebrolu, Department of EE, Indian Institute of Technology,, India
• Bhaskaran Raman, Department of CSE, Indian Institute of Technology, India
• Abhinav Pathak, Department of CSE, Indian Institute of Technology, India

Full text:

Track: Technology for Developing Regions

Slot: 14:00-15:30, Wednesday 24th May

In bridging the digital divide, two important criteria are cost-effectiveness, and power optimization. While 802.11 is cost-effective and is being used in several installations in the developing world, typical system configurations are not really power efficient. In this paper, we propose a novel "Wake-on-WLAN" mechanism for coarse-grained, on-demand power on/off of the networking equipment at a remote site. The novelty also lies in our implementation of a prototype system using low-power 802.15.4-based sensor motes. We describe the prototype, as well as its evaluation on field in a WiFi testbed. Preliminary estimates indicate that the proposed mechanism can save significant power in typical rural networking settings.