Power management for throughput enhancement in wireless ad-hoc networks

We introduce the notion of power management within the context of wireless ad-hoc networks. More specifically, we investigate the effects of using different transmit powers on the average power consumption and end-to-end network throughput in a wireless ad-hoc environment. This power management approach would help in reducing the system power consumption and hence prolonging the battery life of mobile nodes. Furthermore, it improves the end-to-end network throughput as compared to other ad-hoc networks in which all mobile nodes use the same transmit power. The improvement is due to the achievement of a tradeoff between minimizing interference ranges, reduction in the average number of hops to reach a destination, reducing the probability of having isolated clusters, and reducing the average number of transmissions (including retransmissions due to collisions). The protocols would first dynamically determine an optimal connectivity range wherein they adapt their transmit powers so as to only reach a subset of the nodes in the network. The connectivity range would then be dynamically changed in a distributed manner so as to achieve the near optimal throughput. Minimal power routing is used to further enhance performance. Simulation studies are carried out in order to investigate these design approaches. It is seen a network with such a power managed scheme would achieve a better end-to-end throughput performance (about 10% improvement with a slotted aloha MAC protocol) and lower transmit power (about an 80% Improvement) than a network without such a scheme.