A dual IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.15–4 network architecture for energy-efficient communications with low-demanding applications

Energy efficiency has become a regular hot topic in the research on wireless communications networks. However, existing proposals leave room for improvement when multi-hop wireless broadband networks are used to provide on-demand connectivity under low traffic load conditions. For this kind of networks, the capability of bringing the network up and down on demand wirelessly would help significantly to design energy-efficient, compact and low-cost network nodes. This paper presents a new approach for multi-hop energy-efficient networks based on a dual network architecture called dualWireless. Each node belongs to two parallel wireless multi-hop networks, an on-demand IEEE 802.11n network for data communications and a permanent IEEE 802.15–4 network for control purposes. The paper explains the proposal, the development of prototypes and the empirical validation with a testbed. In addition, a power consumption analytical model is used to measure the energy savings achieved by dualWireless and for comparison with other authors proposals. The dualWireless approach is shown to be more energy efficient than other alternatives as long as the occupation time of the network is under 40%, which is the case for many particular applications.