Wlan power management under Linux with iw rules

The command-line tool iw allows a variety of configuration options for wireless devices. Since the power management concerning. The transmitting / receiving performance with some cards is problematic, you can disable this in Linux. The article shows how to install and use the tool on Ubuntu or Debian , Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS. In general, the tool is already preinstalled in most distributions.

Installation of iw

To use iw , use the package manager to perform the installation from the repositories.

• Ubuntu / Debian based systems: $ sudo apt install iw
• RHEL / CentOS: # yum install iw

Use of iw

After a successful installation iw can be executed in the terminal as root and be called with further parameters.

Among other things, the tool offers several options for configuring available WLAN adapters:

• Control of power management
• Control of transmission power
• Output hardware properties of the WLAN device
• Output connection status of the WLAN device
• Scan the neighboring WLAN networks for signal strength (reception quality) / transmission rate and encryption method used

Examples

Here are some examples of how to use iw :

• Get current WLAN interfaces:

# iw dev

• Current device capabilities of the WLAN device:

# iw list

• Switch off power management (problematic: poor transmission / reception power):

# iw dev wlan0 set power_save off

• Get current power management status:

# if dev wlan0 get power_save

Power management in conjunction with NetworkManager

Since the setting is lost during a reboot, it is recommended to permanently enter the settings in the file /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/default-wifi-powersave-on.conf . For example the value “2” for power management “Off”.

Add the following entry to default-wifi-powersave-on.conf :

[Connection]

wifi.powersave = 2