A Rendezvous Reservation Protocol for Low Power Wireless Infrastructure

Low power multihop infrastructure will be increasingly used to provide connectivity in wireless battery-operated radio networks [1]. In this type of network, the applications and services will often vary with time, and thus the minimum power consumption of the system will also be timevarying. In this paper we propose a generalized rendezvous reservation protocol (RRP) which permits low power multihop infrastructure nodes to adapt their power consumption in a dynamic fashion. When applications are initiated a connection setup process is invoked to establish a path and the node rendezvous rates along the intermediate nodes may be altered to meet the new quality of service needs. An algorithm is proposed which can efficiently assign rendezvous rates in a generalized setting. The protocol uses some nominal latency guarantees which are expected to be common in these types of networks. It is shown that the use of the RRP protocol can dramatically reduce the power consumption in this type of system.