Increasing the throughput of multihop packet radio networks with power adjustment

The Packet Radio Network (PRN) is an attractive architecture to support mobile and wireless communication. Although the code assignment problem has been studied extensively on PRN, we observe in this paper that the power control problem has been ignored by most works, but may have significant impact on performance. By power control, we mean that the transmission ranges of stations are tunable. We show given a PRN in which each host already received a code, how to adjust the powers of stations to control/improve the topology of the PRN without violating the original code assignment. Several schemes are proposed. Through simulations, we demonstrate that although the code assignment problem is NP-complete and thus computationally very expensive, using our power adjustment schemes can easily improve the network performance by about 20% with polynomial costs.