A QoS and Power Aware MAC Layer Protocol for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Multimedia communication over wireless networks has become the driving technology for many important applications, experiencing dramatic market growth and promising revolutionary experiences in personal communication, gaming, entertainment, military, security, environment monitoring, and more. The advances in wireless communications and growth of real-time applications have necessitated the development of wireless networks that can support high quality of service (QoS) and power control. A node in an ad hoc network is normally battery operated which poses a huge constraint on the power consumption of such a node. Hence, designing a power efficient MAC protocol for ad hoc wireless networks is a major challenge. In this paper, we propose a reservation based, asynchronous MAC protocol called Multi-rate Multi-hop MAC protocol (MMMP) with power control for multi-hop ad hoc networks. The protocol conserves power and provides QoS guarantees for multimedia traffic. MMMP with power control achieves this by having every node maintain two reservation tables to keep track of ongoing transmissions. It calculates the appropriate transmission power (i.e the power level high enough to reach the destination node rather than transmitting at maximum power) based on node distances, which results in energy savings without causing throughput degradation. Simulation results obtained using the C programming language indicate that MMMP-power control outperforms IEEE 802.11 in all performance metrics and can efficiently handle a large range of traffic intensity. It also outperforms other similar state of the art MAC protocols.