Energy efficient wireless ATM design

Energy efficiency is an important issue for mobile computers since they must rely on their batteries. We present an energy-efficient highly adaptive architecture of a network interface and novel data link layer protocol for wireless networks that provides Quality of Service (QoS) support for diverse traffic types. Due to the dynamic nature of wireless networks, adaptations are necessary to achieve energy efficiency and an acceptable quality of service. If multimedia applications want to achieve optimal performance in an efficient way, they must be aware of the characteristics of the wireless link. Simply relying on the underlying operating system software and communication protocols to transparently hide all the peculiarities of a wireless channel compromises energy consumption and achievable QoS. In our approach we apply adaptability through all layers of the protocol stack, and provide feedback to the applications. In this way the applications can adapt the data streams, and the network protocols can adapt the communication parameters.