Autonomous Power Control MAC Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Battery energy limitation has become a performance bottleneck for mobile ad hoc networks. IEEE 802.11 has been adopted as the current standard MAC protocol for ad hoc networks. However, it was developed without considering energy efficiency. To solve this problem, many modifications on IEEE 802.11 to incorporate power control have been proposed in the literature. The main idea of these power control schemes is to use a maximum possible power level for transmitting RTS/CTS and the lowest acceptable power for sending DATA/ACK. However, these schemes may degrade network throughput and reduce the overall energy efficiency of the network. This paper proposes autonomous power control MAC protocol (APCMP), which allows mobile nodes dynamically adjusting power level for transmitting DATA/ACK according to the distances between the transmitter and its neighbors. In addition, the power level for transmitting RTS/CTS is also adjustable according to the power level for DATA/ACK packets. In this paper, the performance of APCMP protocol is evaluated by simulation and is compared with that of other protocols.