Active Power Control for Ad-Hoc Wireless Networks

This paper considers some of the systems science challenges that are posed when designing power aware wireless devices to operate within an ad-hoc network. Fundamental results from the robust control literature are used to assess whether safety critical tasks can be performed within such a network when power consumption is explicitly considered as an actively managed constraint. A focus of this work is the generation of a testbed wherein "limit of performance" type metrics for a variety of linear design methodologies can be applied to necessarily simplified, yet still representative, dynamic formulations of the problem at hand. In this work results have been obtained using experimental data from wireless devices operating within a (ges90 dB) Azimuth isolation chamber. This chamber allows active MIMO control algorithms to be implemented and tested in a repeatable real time fashion using a TCL scripting engine that provides a suitable basis for the design of network control solutions