A Multi-Radio Power Mangement Scheme for Disruption Tolerant Networks

Power management for nodes in a sensor network is a topic of great interest due to the limited resources available on sensor devices and the need to maximize the network lifetime and delivery ratios. This problem is further compounded in Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs) since they are characterized with frequent partitions and intermittent connectivity, which may further suffer if the case of mobility is considered. Existing power management schemes for wireless networks cannot be applied to DTNs since these mostly assume good connectivity throughout the network. Recent work has proposed leveraging the radio energy consumption properties to optimize network efficiency and power management. This work is based upon extending the context-aware power management (CAPM) scheme, which utilizes the sleep cycle of radios by introducing adaptive cycles for node discovery and data delivery, to use multiple radios which are dedicated to the tasks of neighborhood discovery and data delivery. The proposed multi-radio CAPM (MR-CAPM) power management scheme is evaluated via simulations in multiple scenarios and the results indicate that MR-CAPM can achieve significantly greater energy savings over the CAPM scheme. The MR-CAPM scheme along with simulation results is presented in this paper.