A Traffic-aware Power Management Protocol for Wireless Ad Hoc Networkss

Recently, we have proposed an energy saving Gossip-based Sleep Protocol (GSP) [1] for energy conservation in mobile ad hoc networks. A gossiping node employs a random variable (p) to decide whether or not to enter a sleep mode. Our observation is that in a well connected ad hoc network there are usually many paths existing between a source and a destination, so a percentage (p) of the nodes may be in an energy conserving sleep mode without losing network connectivity. However, putting nodes into a sleep mode may interrupt the ongoing traffic. This can result in a long packet delay and a large packet loss rate. In this paper, we extend GSP to consider the ongoing traffic before changing the radio mode of a node. We term it Traffic-aware GSP (T-GSP) and show its advantages through simulation studies.