Traffic indication map
A Traffic Indication Map (TIM) is an information element within beacon frames transmitted by access points in IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs), designed to inform power-saving stations (STAs) about buffered unicast, broadcast, or multicast traffic pending at the access point for delivery to them.[1] Introduced in the original IEEE 802.11 standard, the TIM plays a central role in power management protocols, enabling battery-constrained devices such as laptops and mobile stations to enter a low-power "doze" state while periodically waking to check for incoming data, thereby conserving energy without missing transmissions.[1] In infrastructure Basic Service Sets (BSSs), access points buffer frames destined for power-saving STAs and use the TIM to signal their availability, prompting affected STAs to transition to an "awake" state and retrieve the data via mechanisms like Power Save Poll (PS-Poll) frames or during contention-free periods.[1] The TIM's structure includes a DTIM Count field (indicating beacons until the next Delivery TIM), a DTIM Period field (specifying the repetition rate, typically 1–255 beacon intervals), a Bitmap Control field, and a Partial Virtual Bitmap of up to 251 octets representing up to 2008 bits, where each bit corresponds to an Association Identifier (AID) of a STA—bit position N (for AID N, where 1 ≤ N ≤ 2007) set to 1 denotes buffered traffic, while AID 0 is reserved for broadcast or multicast indications.[1] Beacon frames containing the TIM are broadcast periodically by the access point at intervals defined by thedot11BeaconPeriod parameter (ranging from 1 to 65,535 Time Units, approximately 1024 μs each), with a default of about 100 ms, ensuring STAs can synchronize and monitor traffic indications without constant activity.[1] STAs in power-save mode configure their ListenInterval to determine wake-up frequency for beacons and use the ReceiveDTIMs parameter to ensure they listen for Delivery TIMs (DTIMs), which are special TIM instances (with DTIM Count = 0) that guarantee delivery of multicast or broadcast frames to all awake STAs.[1] If a STA's corresponding bit in the TIM is set, it sends a PS-Poll frame to the access point during the contention period to retrieve the buffered frame, and the frame's More Data field indicates whether additional traffic remains buffered, potentially requiring repeated polling.[1] This mechanism supports legacy power save modes and has been extended in later amendments, such as IEEE 802.11ah for IoT networks, where TIM segmentation allows handling thousands of STAs by dividing the bitmap into group-specific chunks broadcast in short beacons.[2]
The TIM's efficiency stems from its bitmap-based design, which minimizes overhead by collectively addressing multiple STAs in a single beacon rather than individual notifications, though it requires STAs to maintain association and synchronize with the access point's timing.[1] In modern Wi-Fi implementations, the TIM integrates with advanced power-saving features like Automatic Power Save Delivery (APSD) and Target Wake Time (TWT) in IEEE 802.11ax, but remains foundational for indicating buffered traffic in beacon-based synchronization.[1]