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doru91 edited this page Feb 10, 2017 · 26 revisions

Power Save Support for MultiWiFi

The role of this project is to add Power Save support on the ath9k_htc driver when the WiFi card is used in MultiWiFi scenarios on mobile clients. The main limitation of using MultiWiFi on mobile clients comes from a high level of energy consumption: the existing WiFi drivers offer Power Save support only for one virtual interface so once the second virtual interface is added, the driver automatically disables the Power Save Support.

MultiWiFi, https://www.usenix.org/node/188945, is a technology that allows an 802.11 client to connect to multiple Access Points simultaneously by creating a virtual interface for each AP it sees then maintaining several active connections with those APs. The virtual interfaces are mapped on the same physical WiFi card:

IEEE 802.11 Standard defines the Power Save protocol between an AP and a STA and the messages exchanged between AP<->STA. The algorithm that we develop for Multi-WiFi Power Save will be backward-compatible with existing solutions and will use the same messages defined in the IEEE802.11 standard (e.g.: NULL frame, frames with PS bit set/unset).

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