Impact of power saving MAC scheme on ad hoc network routing protocol

To manage energy limitation problems in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), current power saving (PS) MAC designs mainly concentrate on using various methods to minimize the time in transmission, reception and idle states. This may degrade the latency performance and impacts the route discovery procedure of MANET routing protocols. However, the impact of the PS MAC scheme on routing and the analytical model of PS MAC have not been presented before. In this paper, an analytical framework that addresses a gap in the theoretical performance, which includes the latency of the PS MAC and route discovery, is proposed. The investigation verifies that the power saving MAC scheme leads to serious latency and significantly degrades the route discovery performance of an on-demand routing protocol.