Link Quality-Based Transmission Power Adaptation for Reduction of Energy Consumption and Interference

Today, many wireless devices are mobile and battery powered. Based on the fact that battery capacity is still limited, energy saving is an important issue in wireless communication. Meanwhile, the number of wireless devices continues to increase and this creates interference problems between wireless devices. In this paper, we look at transmission power control and propose a mechanism that tries to achieve minimum energy consumption or emission under any circumstance. Lower transmission power levels may result in more retransmissions, but in total, energy consumption or emission still can be reduced in many scenarios. To evaluate the performance of our mechanism, we used real wireless channels in an indoor environment to carry out measurements. The measurement results indicate that a significant amount of energy consumption or emission reduction can be achieved for the transmitter in most scenarios compared to using a fixed transmission power level for all packets.