Greening campus WLANs: Energy-relevant usage and mobility patterns

The past years have witnessed a significant increase in the number of WLANs deployed in most of the enterprises, campuses and public areas to provide high-speed Internet connectivity. These WLANs typically consist of APs densely installed to assure enough capacity to meet users demand during the peak period of activity. At the same time, it translates into a serious energy wastage during low-utilization periods, when capacity is not needed at the APs. To reduce this wastage, many proposed solutions consist of adapting the active capacity to the actual needs, introducing switching strategies able to turn on and off the APs. The effectiveness and potential benefit of these strategies strongly depend on the user behavior and traffic patterns.