A receiver initiated power control multi-access protocol in wireless ad hoc networks

In this paper, we address the issue of transmission power control (TPC) in wireless ad hoc networks. Power control plays an important role in energy saving and network performance enhancement. However, the existing TPC schemes either face the problem of hidden and exposed terminal or have additional hardware requirements. We propose a novel distributed power control protocol, called Receiver Initiated power control Multi-Access (RIMA) that ideally eliminates the hidden terminal problem and at the same time enjoys the same single-channel, single-transceiver design of nodes in IEEE 802.11 and 802.15 MAC standards. An enhanced version of RIMA is also proposed where reduced power RTS transmission is allowed to improve spatial reuse of the wireless channel. Simulations are performed to demonstrate the enhanced frame loss rate and network delay performance of the proposed approach with respect to a competitive approach, called transmitter initiated power control MAC protocol.