This study proposes an energy‐saving‐centric downlink scheduling scheme to support efficient power utilization and to satisfy the QoS requirements. The base station considers the queue lengths of mobile stations with real‐time and non‐real‐time connections and considers their QoS requirements to determine the sleeping parameters when the mobile stations issue sleep requests. The proposed scheme appropriately reschedules the sleep‐requesting mobile station to transmit its queued packets for optimal power‐saving efficiency. The QoS requirement is considered as the constraint during traffic rescheduling. The treatment of real‐time connections generally requires a trade‐off of the delay requirement and the longer sleep window, and the non‐real‐time connections must concern the packet drop and minimum data rates when performing the energy‐centric scheduling. Two rescheduling algorithms, that is, whole and partial reschedules, are proposed and analyzed in this paper. The whole‐reschedule scheme provides improved energy‐saving performance at the cost of tolerable longer delay and computing complexity when compared with the partial‐reschedule scheme. Our simulation results indicated that both schemes not only guarantee the desired QoS but also achieve superior energy‐saving efficiency to that of traditional scheduling. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.