Transmission power control for ad hoc wireless networks: throughput, energy and fairness

We introduce a new power control scheme, for IEEE 802.11-like MAC protocols. Our scheme carefully combines collision avoidance and spatial reuse. Although many power control schemes were proposed for IEEE 802.11, to the best of our knowledge, our scheme is the first to achieve significant improvements for network throughput and energy efficiency simultaneously (up to 40% throughput increase and 3 times more data delivery with the same amount of energy), while adhering to the single-channel, single-transceiver design rule. Furthermore, our scheme solves the fairness problem identified in (J. Monks et al, IEEE INFOCOM, 2003), i.e., IEEE 802.11 and some power control schemes deliver more packets for short distance source-destination pairs than for long distance pairs. Thus, our scheme also improves the bit-metre/sec metric (by up to 70%). Our proposed scheme belongs to a more general class of power control schemes, that we extensively simulate. We also provide a theoretical analysis to justify our approach and simulation results.