Enhancing Power Saving Mechanisms for Ad hoc Networks

According to PSM, each station must announce traffic before its transmission. PSM requires for this purpose a rather large handshaking period to complete the required announcements. This functional behavior puts a heavy constraint on the size of the announcement period and consequently on throughput, delay and more importantly on power consumption. This paper proposes an optimization of some functional properties of PSM in order to improve its performances. Our proposed UTA-PSM (Unicast Topology Aware Power Saving Mechanism) aims to reduce the number of exchanged announcement frames in order to reduce the announcement period. Conducted simulations show that UTA-PSM outperforms superbly PSM and power saving mechanisms such as the DCS-ATIM that dynamically adjusts the handshaking period according to the traffic load. We show that UTA-PSM delivers more throughput with a smaller average delay yet yielding a much better power saving and robustness.