Optimal Asymmetric and Maximized Adaptive Power Management Protocols for Clustered Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

IEEE 802.11 is currently the most popular medium access control (MAC) standard for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). On the other hand, clustering in MANETs is a promising technique to ensure the scalability of various communication protocols. Thus, we propose an optimal asymmetric and maximized adaptive power management protocol, called OAMA, for 802.11-based clustered MANETs, which has the following attractive features. 1) Given the length of schedule repetition interval (SRI), the duty cycles of both clusterheads and members reach the theoretical minimum. 2) Under the minimum duty cycle constraints, the numbers of tunable SRIs for clusterheads and members reach the theoretical maximum. 3) By means of factor-correlative coterie-plane product, OAMA guarantees bounded-time neighbor discovery between the clusterhead and its member, and between all clusterheads, regardless of stations' individual SRIs and the schedule offset between neighboring stations. 4) The time complexity of OAMA neighbor maintenance is O(1). 5) OAMA adopts a cross-layer SRI adjustment scheme such that stations can adaptively tune the values of SRI to maximize energy conservation according to flow timeliness requirements. Both theoretical analyses and simulation results show that OAMA substantially outperforms existing power management protocols for clustered MANETs, including AQEC [2] and ACQ [14], in terms of duty cycle, adaptiveness, data delay dropped ratio, network lifetime, and end-to-end energy throughput.