Energy efcient RoF based Centralized Enterprise

WLAN (CE-WLAN)
Diptanil DebBarma
Department of Electrical Engineering
Eindhoven University of Technology
Eindhoven, The Netherlands 5612
Email: d.debbarma@tue.nl
AbstractIn 802.11 standard, meager effort has been invested
towards devising energy efcient WLAN communication. Especially with the massive deployment of centralized enterprise
WLAN (CE-WLAN), in indoor networks, a lot of access points
(APs) are densely packed for increasing the capacity offered. But
most of the APs deployed are idle for a larger period of time
over a day. This paper proposes to use a centralized controlled
distributed antenna systems (DAS) employing Radio over Fiber
(RoF) technique for energy efcient management of such indoor
network. This paper proposes an antenna selection scheme which
provides overall coverage of the indoor network. We also discuss
different real life scenarios where RoF based CE-WLAN is very
efcient in reducing overall energy consumption of the network.
We also validate the usefulness of RoF CE-WLAN (using real
life WLAN traces) based on association based strategy and show
that it gain extensively for clustered network entity scenario.

I.

I NTRODUCTION

Densely deployed CE-WLAN have become a xture for

supporting mass connectivity and providing large data rates in
indoor networks. However meager attention has been devoted
towards reducing the total energy consumption of these CEWLAN networks. Most indoor environments are opting for
a centralized dense deployment of WiFi APs following the
CAPWAP (see [1]) architecture where IEEE 802.11x functions
are implemented across multiple entities. The APs in CAPWAP
are connected to a central controller which coordinates the
radio resource distribution between those APs. The idea behind
centralized enterprise WLANs is to provide non-interfering
APs with overlapping cell areas. This is used to provide users
wih the required QoS for critical situations. But such critical
situations occur only temporarily and last a short time as has
been pointed out in [2]. Moreover the usage of APs varies
over time and space. Thus most of the APs are frequently in
idle mode or are underutilized. We have highlighted this point
in [3], where we examined the SNMP traces of Dartmouth
College campus [4]. We observed that the percentage of
average usage of APs in residential buildings is larger than
in academic buildings. We also found that the probability that
an AP remains idle for at least 7 hrs was 0.52. We can perform
a quick approximate evaluation about how much power can be
saved by switching off APs during the idle period. [5] states
that each individual AP consumes approximately 20 Wh of
energy. Aruba networks reported 100 new customer acquisition
with each customer requiring 75 APs per WLAN in 2009 [6].
Thus an approximate amount of power that is wasted during 7
hours idle time per day over a week sums up to a staggering

3.7 MW. As more AP redundancy is added in the network

the problem will only intensify. Thus power consumption as a
design goal should be included as a foremost strategy in such
CE-WLANs .
Only a few papers exists in literature that talk about
minimizing network energy consumption for dense WLAN. [2]
proposes a technique to minimize the total power consumption
across all APs in the network. Clusters of APs collocated in
a small area are created. All but one AP is turned off to
provide coverage. When the number of active users increases,
more APs are turned on by Wake on LAN. In [7] the
authors propose to turn off more APs than the scheme in [2]
without shrinking the coverage area. The scheme introduces
the concept of a sleeping cluster, whose coverage area is fully
covered by neighboring clusters. The feasibility of WiFi simulcast transmissions from individual APs to multiple distributed
antennas (CANs in our case) over RoF system are described
in [8]. But none of these considers dynamically assigning
the connections between APs and the CANs in order to save
energy. Transmission Power Control (TPC) is used to minimize
the power consumption of an AP when active users are located
close to the AP. Power consumption is reduced by a small
amount of around 100mW as compared to switching off AP
which saves about 5W. The reduction of power consumption
for users was studied in [9], [10]. But those schemes are
not applicable for the AP, as the AP need to stay active to
acknowledge the connection requests and receive packets from
users who are active in the network. In this paper we show
that a centralized DAS based on RoF technique, also called
Fiber-Wireless (Fi-Wi) LANs, could achieve signicant energy
savings by dynamically managing the operation of the APs, as
a function of the user trafc demand.
II.

S YSTEM D ESCRIPTION

The use of a Fi-Wi architecture for distributing the radio

signals in indoor spaces is growing [11]. The hybrid Fi-Wi
network described in our paper consists of a ber infrastructure, controlled by a central home communication controller
(HCC) where all the APs are collocated (Fig. 1). HCC serves
as the brain of the network. Using RoF technology, the radio
signals generated at the AP are distributed to the different
distributed antennas inside room (namely cell access nodes
(CAN)) using signal distribution network (SDN), to cover
the immediate periphery of the indoor network. SDN thus
multiplexes optical signals in the downstream direction from

c 2015 IEEE
978-1-4799-8569-2/15/$31.00 

HCC to CANs, and de-multiplexes the signals in the upstream

direction. The radio network manager (RNM) located in the
HCC is used as the central controller that decides which APs
and CANs are turned on and which APs are connected to which
CANs. In a RoF WLAN, an AP can connect to many CANs
thus changing the cell areas served by this AP dynamically.
In contrast, in traditional WLANs, APs serve xed cell areas.
The Fi-Wi WLAN can thus minimize resource wastage due to
under-utilization of AP. The RoF based CE-WLAN consists
of m APs represented by set M = {1, 2, ..., m}, located at
the HCC and providing connectivity to n CANs represented
by N = {1, 2, ..., n}. Out of the n CANs, there are primary
CANs (PCANs), (represented by P = {1, 2, ..., p}), which
are used to provide complete basic coverage of the indoor
network and there are secondary CANs (SCANs) (represented
by S = {1, 2, ..., s}), which are switched on as the user
demand across the APs connected to the PCANs increases.
A. Power Consumption Model
HCC

Laser

RS-232
Monitor

Microcontroller
Unit

Power
Meter

TIA

PA

ATT

Photodiode

AP 2

Laser

AGC

Driver
Power
Meter

Photodiode

RS-232
Monitor

Microcontroller
Unit

Filter

ATT

PA

TIA

AP m

CAN

MUX

Filter

INTERNET

Driver

Signal Distribution Network (SDN)

AP 1

MUX

AGC

Radio Network
Manager (RNM)

Fig. 1: Fi-Wi RoF indoor WLAN connection in-between CAN

and HCC
We provided a detailed analytical model for the power
consumed in an indoor RoF CE-WLAN in [3]. For the sake
of completeness, let us re-write the total power consumed in
the RoF based CE-WLAN network as below (see Fig. 1),


P{rof n/w} =
ij (pAP + pCAN + pOL ) +
jM iP

jM kS

kj (pAP + pCAN + pOL ) + p{C/M }

(1)

where, ij {0, 1} , kj {0, 1} represents if PCAN i P

is connected to AP j and if SCAN k S is connected to
AP j respectively. P{rof n/w} represents the power across
the total RoF CE-WLAN network. p{AP } , p{CAN } is used
to represent the power consumed at the AP and CAN (see
Fig. 1). The exact expression for p{AP } and p{CAN } can be
found in [3]. p{OL} in (1) represents the power consumed due
to optical ber transmission and p{C/M } represents the power
consumption due to computation and maintenance operations,
and incorporates the power consumed at the SDN, RNM .
The power consumption due to SDN and RNM is of the
order of few Watts which is a constant as RNM and SDN
are always switched on. The values of the power consumed at
every component is also provided as a table in [3].

III.

PCAN SELECTION STRATEGY

One of the important rule of resource on demand (RoD)

policies that are adopted for energy efcient operation of CEWLAN is that we have to ensure complete basic coverage. For
our Fi-Wi architecture, we thus have to nd out the PCANs
that should be kept switched on.
A. Jardoshs Scheme
In [2] the author proposed to use -clustering technique
for selecting APs to be kept switched on for providing overall
basic coverage. The main motivation was that if the APs are in
close proximity to one another then a single AP is sufcient to
provide basic coverage to the areas served by all those closely
placed APs, by increasing the transmit power level of the
cluster head AP. In our hybrid Fi-Wi architecture, we replaced
the APs indoor with CANs. Thus for indoor Fi-Wi scenarios,
where we deploy large number of CANs to provide redundant
coverage, our problem is to nd a minimal set of CAN (namely
PCAN) which should be powered on to ensure overall basic
coverage for the network. The clustering approach discussed
in [2] can thus be changed to t our Fi-Wi architecture briey.
It consists of the following steps.
1) Neighborhood Discovery Phase: During this phase we
determine whether two CANs can be members of the same
cluster, if they lay close to each other in some measure. For
example, in [2] they selected a passive measurement technique
for determining the proximity between APs. We can use similar
techniques for CANs. During the set up phase, we can connect
any two CAN (say i and j) to different APs collocated at
the HCC. The APs then record the beacon messages that they
receive from each other through the CANs and determine if the
two CANs are in close proximity or not. Each AP records the
number and the signal strength of beacon messages received
through the CANs. If the median of the number of beacon
messages received by the AP connected to CAN i from other
AP connected to CAN j is represented by (i, j) and the
median signal strength be represented by (i, j), then the
CANs are said to in close proximity of each other if,
(i, j) Nthres and (j, i) Nthres

(2)

(i, j) Sthres and (j, i) Sthres

(3)

The CANs are thus added to each others neighborhood list.

We thus build a neighbor list for all CANs (namely i for CAN
i). These measurements are only carried out over a very large
time-scale of the order of days, when signicant changes in
the physical indoor environment occur.
2) Cluster Formation: The next step is to nd the neighborhood sets for all CANs, to form clusters of CANs. A fast
greedy clustering approach was adopted as [2]. i is used to
represent the neighborhood set of CAN i, and ni ||i || as
the number of neighbors present in the neighborhood of CAN
i. Set C is used to represent the information on the clusters of
the CANs and the members of each cluster of CAN. Cluster
set C is initialized to 0 (C ). We select CAN i with
the largest value of ni at any iteration of cluster formation.
We use the CAN i with the maximum ni because that CAN
is likely to form the largest cluster in the RoF based CEWLAN. Once i is chosen, we form Cv as a cluster, add i

as the rst member of the cluster, and simultaneously remove

i from all neighborhood sets of other CANs. We then look
through all the CANs j in the neighborhood set i , and add
them to Cv as long as every new j that is added to Cv is
in the neighborhood set of every other CAN already added
to Cv . This is called as the -cluster condition. If the CAN
j satises the -cluster condition and is added to the cluster
Cv , j is removed from the neighbor sets of all its neighbor
CANs k, and the nk value for all CAN k is updated. The
removal of the CAN from all the other neighborhood sets is
to ensure that each CAN is a member of only a single disjoint
cluster. Also note that we include CANs in a cluster if and
only if they satisfy the -cluster condition, because otherwise
the clients in the vicinity of a cluster may be too far away
from a CAN in the cluster to maintain a connection. Once all
the CANs that satisfy the -cluster condition have been added
to cluster Cv , CAN i is made the PCAN of the cluster, and all
the other CANs are tagged as SCANs of Cv . This algorithm of
cluster formation from the neighborhood set of each CAN is
iterative. Once clusters of CANs are formed, the PCAN from
each cluster remain powered on by default at all times. Since
the CANs within a cluster are in close proximity from each
other, all the clients within the same cluster region will be
able to communicate with the PCAN without impacting their
performance. Moreover, since the transmit power of CANs in
a high-density WLAN is often reduced signicantly to avoid
excessive overlapping of CAN coverage areas, the PCAN of
each cluster may increase its transmit power by default so
that the WLAN maintains the same coverage as an always-on
WLAN. Drawbacks of Jardoshs Scheme : The clustering is
performed to nd a set of APs to be kept switched on for
overall basic coverage. But the technique does not ensure that
the minimal set of APs are chosen. The scheme also does
not ensure that the capacity of each AP is maximally utilized.
The scheme even doesnt propose any technique to select the
cluster head AP for a cluster and moreover, does not provide
any answers, regarding the operational transmit power levels
at the APs.
Modied Jardoshs scheme: One of the drawback that was
pointed out in Jardoshs scheme was that it did not propose any
technique to select the cluster head AP (or PCAN in our case).
The cluster head was selected by random picking. One of the
simplest logical reasoning for choosing a node as a cluster
head (PCAN) is that if the node (viz. CAN in our case) lies
closer to all other nodes in the cluster as compared to any other
of its cluster nodes, then it can be chosen as a PCAN, which
intuitively can improve the coverage range of the CANs, when
the transmit power of the cluster head is increased to ensure
basic coverage. This we refer to as the modied Jardoshs
scheme.
B. Neighbor Scheme
The modied Jardoshs scheme proposed above, indeed
helps us to make little improvement in terms of the data rate
perceived by the user and the probability of outage achievable.
But one of the major drawback of Jardoshs scheme is that,
the scheme does not choose the minimal number of PCANs in
the network needed to ensure basic coverage. To illustrate the
drawback, let us consider Fig. 2 (a). In Fig. 2 (a), we can see
that the middle CANs beacon packets were reachable to all
other CANs in the vicinity. When we applied the technique

of [2], two clusters of CANs were formed. Thus we can

observe that although the technique helps in minimizing the
number of CANs needed to ensure basic coverage, but it does
not attain the least minimal set of CANs which can ensure the
same basic coverage. In this neighbor scheme we thus propose
to use repetitive -clustering approach to nd the minimal set
of PCAN. In repetitive -clustering approach we repeat the
process of neighbor selection and clustering of the selected
CANs from the previous round, if it is feasible. Let us illustrate
the technique by an example below.
Example 1: In this example we can see that after the
clusters were formed in round 1 (see Fig. 2 (a)), the cluster
head is then selected. In this approach the CAN with the
highest degree of neighbor connectivity is selected as cluster
head. Once the cluster heads are selected, then in second round
we regroup the CANs if they still could connect to any other
CANs in the vicinity that are chosen from the rst round. We
update the degree of neighbor count and perform -clustering
approach again. If we proceed iteratively then we will achieve
the minimal number of PCANs that should be kept on for basic
coverage (see Fig. 2 (b)).



















Fig. 2: (a) Jardoshs scheme (b) Neighbor scheme

C. Proposed Scheme
The proposed scheme is based on few assumptions. We
assume that the number of CANs, APs are known. There are K
operating transmit power level across CANs K = {1, 2, ..., k}.
The position of the CANs are also assumed to be known. We
assume that the RSSI threshold value for proper reception of
beacon is known to be Pth and also the transmit power levels
across the CANs are assumed to be known (PCAN k ). The steps
of the algorithm are explained below.
Algorithm 1 Proposed Scheme
Step 1 Initialize the transmit power level across each CANs
to the lowest level. (i.e. PCAN 1 )
Step 2 Using the lowest power level and Pth value of RSSI
threshold, we can nd the maximum distance of CAN that can
get proper beacon reception. This can be given as below,
dth = 10

PCAN Ld X Pth
1
0
10

(4)

Step 3 Now we choose the maximum transmit power level

across CANs (PCAN k ). We then perform Neighbor scheme
discussed above with the maximum transmit power level,
where we can choose the CANs as neighbor if RSSI of the
received beacon is Pth , and the distance between CANs
(dCAN ) < dthk dth .
In the proposed scheme, we thus overcome the drawback mentioned for the Jardoshs scheme. For comparing the
schemes discussed above, we use Monte-Carlo simulations in
MATLAB. Fig. 3 (a) compares the Jardoshs scheme against

AP 1

AAPP 4

AP

AAP 3
AAPP 4

Group 2

CAN

AAPP 5
AAPP 6

RNM

RNM

(a)

(c)

(b)

Fig. 4: (a) Collocated Network entity Scenario(RoF Scheme)

(b) Clustered Network Entity Scenario (Traditional Scheme)
(c) Clustered Network Entity Scenario (RoF Scheme)

on the lower count of users before which an AP is switched off

helps in reducing the frequent switch on and off of CAN and
AP. Thus the m+1th AP is switched on if the number of users
is greater than mK but the number of active APs reduces to m
only if the number of users in the cluster is mK Tl where,
Tl represents the lower count of users. Now, we compare the
RoF scheme and traditional scheme for the aforementioned two
different scenarios based on the simplest RoD strategy namely
Association Based Strategy (ABS).
90

10

Academic Building (Tl =1)

Residential Building (Tl =1)

70

60

Average no. of
changes = 3.541/hr

50

40

30

20

Average no. of
changes = 1.500/hr

10

0
0

No. of Switch on/off of CANs/AP in hour interval

Next, the most important study in this paper, is that we

showcase scenarios where the RoF based CE-WLAN scheme
is benecial than the traditional CE-WLAN deployment. To
illustrate the benets of the proposed RoF CE-WLAN scheme
we utilized the real life WLAN data sets of Dartmouth Campus [4]. In our simulations we compare two different scenarios
namely 1)Collocated Network Entity Scenario, 2)Clustered
Network Entity Scenario. These scenarios reect the different
real life possibilities. The Fig. 4(a) represents the collocated
scenario where all the CANs or APs are deployed such that
they have overlapping cell areas i.e. one PCAN connected
to an AP is sufcient for providing basic coverage over the
whole cell area (for RoF scheme) or one AP is sufcient
(in traditional scheme). Similarly Fig. 4(b),(c) represents the
cluster scenario where two individual cluster groups of network
entities (either CANs or APs) are formed and the different
clusters needs one individual network entity (AP or PCAN)
to provide full coverage in its cluster area. Now we compare
the RoF scheme and traditional scheme for the aforementioned
scenarios based on the simplest RoD strategy namely Association Based Strategy (ABS). In ABS the resources are provided
based on the number of users connected in the network.
The crude measurement of the utilization of a network is
represented by the number of users connected to the radio
interfaces. Lets denote the maximum number of users that can
be connected to an AP by K. The idea behind ABS is that if
the number of users associated with APs in a cluster is greater
than mK then the number of APs needed to be switched on
is m + 1. But in a highly dynamic network scenario where
the users are frequently entering and leaving the cluster the
strategy might lead to higher number of switch on and switch
off of APs and the associated CANs. Thus adding a hysteresis

Group 2

AAPP 6

No. of switch on/off of AP/CAN

E NERGY E FFICIENCY OF RO F CE-WLAN

AAP 2

AAPP 5

80

IV.

Group 1
SDN

AAP 3

Group 1

AP 1

AAP 2

SDN

the modied Jardoshs scheme in terms of the data rate as

a function of the RSSI threshold values of the CANs for
proper reception of beacon messages. For different number
of CANs, we can see that modied Jardoshs scheme achieves
higher data rate than Jardoshs scheme but the gain in the
data rate is very minimal. We then compare all the schemes
probability of outage value for different active CAN rate.
Active CAN rate represents the percentage of the total CANs
that are active and are used to provide connectivity. The least
probability of outage is achieved by the proposed scheme for
any active CAN rate. This is because in the proposed scheme
we use the highest transmit power level to form the cluster
group of CANs with least number of PCANs, whereas for the
Jardoshs scheme we kept the transmit power level to half of
the highest value. This is because with Jardoshs scheme we are
performing -clustering approach only once. Thus evidently
our proposed scheme achieves lower probability of outage with
minimal number of PCANs. We then compare the important
information theoretic parameter of data rate achievable for all
the schemes discussed as a function of the active CAN rate,
when the number of CANs are taken to be 10. We can see
that our proposed scheme outperforms the other schemes and
achieves very high data rates (i.e., approximately 40 Mbps
for 0.7 active CAN rate). The random sleeping scheme where
CANs are chosen randomly and switched off performs the
worst in terms of data rate. This can be also be attributed
also to the transmit power levels of the PCANs.

Residential Building (T =1)

l

Academic Building (T =3)

l

Academic Building (T =1)

l

Differenece
in using Tl=1
and Tl =3

6
5
4
3
2
1

(a)

10
15
Hours of a Day

20

0
0

10
15
Hours of a Day

20

(b)

Fig. 6: (a) Cumulative Number of switch on/off of CAN/AP

over a Day (b) Number of switch on/off of CAN/AP over 1
hour interval
The schemes are compared against the Always on Strategy
where all the network entities i.e. CANs and APs are kept
switched on all the time. Fig. 5(a) portrays the number of
users connected to 6 different AP in an academic building on
a Monday and Fig. 5(b) depicts the number of users connected
to 6 different APs in a residential building during a Saturday
and are obtained from the SNMP trace-sets of [4]. In the
simulations of ABS the maximum number of users that can be
connected to an AP is kept at 15 whereas, the Tl was varied
between 1 and 3. In the collocated network entity scenario,
we only consider the RoF scheme and not the traditional
scheme, as the RoF scheme intuitively consumes more power
because they have to power more network entities (viz. CAN)
as compare to the traditional scheme. But we have found that
power saving difference for both the schemes for ABS are
similar. Fig. 5 (c), (d) depicts the percentage of energy saving
that is achievable w.r.t. to the Always on Strategy for collocated
network entity scenario. The maximum percentage of power
saving that is achievable for academic building (see Fig. 5(c))

No. of CAN=10
40

RSSI threshold =45dBm

10
1.5

10

35

30

Probability of Outage

Data Rate (Mbps)

10

1.3

10

10

Jardoshs Scheme (CAN=10)

Jardoshs Scheme (CAN=5)
Jardoshs Scheme (CAN=12)
Jardoshs Scheme (CAN=15)
Modified Jardoshs Scheme (CAN=10)
Neighbor Scheme (CAN=10)
Proposed Scheme (CAN=10)

10

Jardoshs Scheme (CAN=10)

Jardoshs Scheme (CAN=12)

10

Jardoshs Scheme (CAN=15)

Data Rate (Mbps)

10
1.4

20

15

10

Random Sleeping Scheme

Jardoshs Scheme
Modified Jardoshs scheme
Neighbor Scheme
Proposed Scheme

Modified Jardoshs Scheme (CAN=15)

1.2

25

Modified Jardoshs Scheme (CAN=12)

10

Modified Jardoshs Scheme (CAN=10)

0
0.1

50

45

40

35

10

30

RSSI Threshold CAN (dBm)

0.2

(a)

0.4
0.6
Active CAN rate

0.8

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5

0.6

0.7

0.8

0.9

Active CAN rate

(b)

(c)

Fig. 3: (a) Data rate Vs. RSSI threshold of CANs for Jardoshs scheme and Modied Jardoshs scheme (b) Prob. of Outage Vs.
Active CAN rate for different schemes (c) Data rate Vs. Active CAN rate for different schemes
15

0
0
1

20

10

15

20

Academic Building 6: AP3

20
0
0
40

10

15

20

Academic Building 6: AP4

20
0
0
20

10

15

20

Academic Building 6: AP5

10
0
0
20

10

15

20

Academic Building 6: AP6

10

15

20

0
0
40

10

15

20

Residential Building 23: AP 3

20
0
0
20

10

15

10

15

20

Residential Building 23: AP 5

10

15

20

Residential Building 23: AP 6

10

15

20

0
0

10

15

20

Hours of a Day

Hours of a Day

(a)

(b)

Residential Building on Saturday

40
30
20
10
0

10

20
0
0

10
15
Hours of a Day

20

T =1
l

80

20

40
20
5

(c)

10
15
Hours of a Day

100

50

Tl=3
Tl =1

0
0

10

15

20

Hours of a Day

T =3

60

0
0

15

Hours of a Day

100

5
0
0
4

40

Residential Building 23: AP 4

10
0
0
10

60

20

10
0
0

Associated Number of Users

0
0
40

Residential Building 23: AP 2

0.5

Energy Saving (%)

10

Difference in energy
saving (%)

Academic Building 6: AP2

10

Energy Saving (%)

0
0
20

Associated Number of Users

80

Residential Building 23: AP 1

Associated No. of Users

10

Academic Building 6: AP1

10

Associated no. of users

Academic Building on Monday

20

20

20
15
10
5
0
0

10

15

20

Hours of a Day

(d)

Fig. 5: (a) Associated number of users to different APs in Academic Building on Monday (b) Associated number of users
to different APs in Residential Building on Saturday (c) Percentage of energy saving over a day for Academic Building (d)
Percentage of energy saving over a day for Residential Building
was nearly 83% whereas the minimum power saving was
approximately 20%. For the residential building (see Fig. 5(d))
the minimum power saving was even higher than the academic
building case (viz. 50%) as the number of users in the network
are lower than the academic building case and thus require
lesser number of APs and CANs. Tl has an impact on the
power saving percentage. As it can be seen from Fig. 5 (c), (d)
the impact of Tl is very minimal and only occurs very rarely
over a day. Higher Tl results in lower power saving (viz. 17%
for residential building). However the impact of Tl could be
enormous if the network is highly dynamic with higher number
of users entering or leaving the network.
TABLE I: Energy Saving (Academic Building: ABS)
Scenario
Collocated
Collocated
Clustered
Clustered

Strategy
ABS
ABS
ABS
ABS

Scheme
Traditional
RoF
Traditional
RoF

Energy Saving (KW/Day)

4.7724
4.7028
3.9145
4.6899

One more important metric is to compare the cumulative

number of total switch on and off of CAN and APs needed
over a day and also the number of maximum switches over
an hour. This metric helps us understand if the users will face
heavy disruption in the network which can degrade the quality
of the service perceived . Fig. 6(a) compares the cumulative
number of switch on/off of CANs and APs and was shown
to be an average of 3.541 changes per hour for academic
building, and 1.5 changes per hour for residential building.
However the effective no. of changes that takes place over
an interval of 1 hour is shown in Fig. 6(b). It can be seen

that the maximum number of changes for academic building

was found out to be 10 changes per hour. Moreover, we
can see that higher Tl = 3 results in lesser changes in
the network. The case of collocated network entities is the
best possible scenario where the all the CANs are in close
neighborhood, thus resulting in full usage of APs and CANs
and only switches more APs or CANs if the number of users
are greater than the number of users that can be supported by
the APs. However in this case the RoF approach cannot gain
as compared to the traditional deployment because while in
traditional deployments the entities that needed to be switched
on are just APs, for RoF based scheme we also use distributed
antennas namely CANs along with the APs collocated at the
HCC. Next we compare the gains for the case of cluster based
network deployment. It presents a different interesting case
where the RoF scheme can be shown to gain extensively,
over the traditional deployment of APs. In a dense CE-WLAN
network the cluster based network deployment is much more
realistic and hence presents a valid conclusion that RoF scheme
is more protable in terms of energy saving as compared to
traditional deployment.
In Fig. 7 (a) we wanted to study the energy saving gain for
clustered network entity scenario for both RoF and traditional
scheme. The gure shows the variation in the number of users
associated in two different cluster groups (viz. Group 1 and 2)
over a day. The maximum energy saving for academic building
(see Fig. 7 (a)), obtained by the traditional approach over
the Always on Strategy was found to be roughly 66% and a
minimum of 0% energy saving was observed during the peak

Traditional scheme

RoF scheme

40

Academic Building

80

0
0

10
15
Hours of a Day

20

40
20
0
0

100

10
15
Hours of a Day

20

Traditional Scheme
RoF Scheme

50

0
0

No. of switch on/off of AP

20
30

Average no. of
changes = 1.66/hr

25

20

15

10

10
15
Hours of a Day

20

(a)

0
0

60
50
40
Average no. of
changes =2.083/hr

30
20

Average no. of
changes =3.75/hr

70

Average no. of
changes = 0.375/hr

10

15

Hours of a Day

20

Number of APs switched on

35

Residential Building
Academic Building

Academic Building
Residential Building

10
0
0

(b)

10
15
Hours of a Day

20

Number of Switching changes

(on/off) of AP (Every hour)

40

90

No. of switch on/off of CAN/AP.

Energy Saving (%)

Associated no.
of Users (Group 2)

Associated no.
of Users (Group 1)

Academic Building
60

2
Traditional Scheme
RoF Scheme
0
0

10
15
Hours of a Day

20

RoF Scheme
Traditional Scheme

0
0

(c)

10
15
Hours of a Day

20

(d)

Fig. 7: (a) Percentage of energy saving for clustered scenario (ABS) over a day for Academic Buildings (b) Cumulative Number
of switch on/off of CAN/AP for clustered scenario (ABS) for Traditional approach (c) Cumulative Number of switch on/off of
CAN/AP for clustered scenario (ABS) for RoF approach (d) Number of switch on/off of AP for ABS
hours. But if we employ the RoF scheme we can indeed see
that the maximum energy saving is hiked up-to 83% and a
minimal energy saving of approximately 20% was recorded.
Thus showing that RoF scheme allows for full utilization of
the APs capacity by providing connectivity to multiple CANs
to appease the user demands, whereas, in traditional approach
more APs in different cluster groups are kept switched on even
though the user requirement is low. Now if we compare the
metric for number of switching changes (see Fig. 7 (b), (c))
needed we can see that for a traditional deployments where the
network entities are just APs the average number of changes
per hour was just 1.66 for academic building. In RoF scheme
the average number of switching changes that have to be
performed on the CANs and APs combined was found out
to be 3.75 per hour. Thus in terms of network changes the
RoF scheme yields larger network changes. Moreover we can
also notice that the number of changes for a cluster based
network scenario for RoF scheme is higher than the collocated
network scenario as the number of CANs that needed to be
switched on or off is more. From Fig. 7(d) we can observe
the number of switching changes (on/off)of APs needed every
hour (academic building case) for both RoF and traditional
scheme. This Fig. 7(d) provides valuable information about
the disruption that the users will face in the network due
to switching on or off of APs. We can see that while the
maximum number of changes for APs was 5 for traditional
scheme, the number of changes was found out to be 6 for
RoF scheme. Thus the disruption caused to the users due to
dis-association from an old AP and association to a new AP
will not be much different than the traditional scheme.
V.

than traditional deployment of APs. We show a huge gain in

terms of energy saving for simple association based strategy for
clustered network scenario. The RoF scheme denitely shows
a huge promise in terms of energy saving as compared to the
traditional scheme although the penalty is paid in terms of
number of network switching changes needed to be performed.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The work in this paper is partially supported by Dutch IOP
GenCom MEANS Project.
R EFERENCES
[1]
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[3]
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[8]

C ONCLUSIONS

In this paper we discussed about energy efcient operation

of RoF based CE-WLAN. One of the major class of policies
for energy efcient operation of CE-WLAN are the RoD
policies. The RoD policies requires to ensure complete basic
coverage of the indoor network and add more resources as
the user demand increases. In this paper, we discussed various
schemes to ensure basic coverage, by selecting PCANs across
the set of CAN. We proposed a scheme which was show to
outperform Jardoshs scheme and overcome the drawbacks of
the Jardoshs scheme. It shows better performance in terms
of data rates and probability of outage. Next we compared
the scenarios in which RoF based CE-WLAN performs better

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