Patent ID: 7310325

Claim:
A method of conserving electric power in a wireless local area network (LAN), comprising: a search step of searching a beacon signal periodically sent from an access point through the wireless LAN with a mobile terminal device to obtain beacon frame information sent from the access point; a certification step of sending a certification request from the mobile terminal device to the access point to obtain certification from the access point; a connection step of sending a connection request from the mobile terminal device to the access point to obtain connection permission from the access point; an information holding step of holding network information in the mobile terminal device necessary for data communication with the access point; a power termination step of terminating electric power supplied to hardware of the mobile terminal device for performing the data communication with the access point when the data communication is not performed within a predetermined period of time and network connection is terminated while the mobile terminal device measures a period of time between each time the data communication is performed; a power supply step of supplying the electric power to the hardware when it is necessary to send data from the mobile terminal device to the access point through an input operation of the mobile terminal device while the electric power to the hardware is terminated; and a communication resuming step of resuming the data communication with the access point according to the network information after the electric power is supplied again to the hardware.