An Analysis on the Power Consumption of Nodes in Ad hoc IEEE 802.11 Networks

This article analyzes the power consumption of nodes in ad hoc IEEE 802.11 networks. The main objective of this analysis is to discover theoretic restrictions for the gains obtained in node lifetime through different energy conservation techniques found in the literature. The evaluation of energy consumption considers the characteristics of the medium access method and the interaction of the nodes in the packet forwarding process. The basic idea is to regulate the lifetime of a node based on its average consumption. Consumption is estimated based on the amount of time the node remnants transmitting, receiving or idle. The potential gains obtained by different techniques for saving or balancing energy consumption are then analysed. It is shown that the flow balancing technique can achieve a maximum gain for the node lifetime between 11% and 30%, depending on the network configuration.