An Evaluation of a Conservative Transmit Power Control Mechanism on an Indoor 802.11 Wireless Mesh Testbed

Power control techniques for IEEE 802.11 wireless networks have already gained considerable attention. Such techniques are particularly attractive because they can improve various aspects of wireless network operation such as interference mitigation, spatial reuse in dense wireless deployments, topology control, and link quality enhancement. In this paper we propose a novel delivery ratio based Conservative Transmit Power Control (ConTPC) mechanism. Our implementation is conservative when it comes to deciding if the transmit power should be reduced for a given link. This is because we do not want poor quality wireless links to further reduce their quality and be overwhelmed by other links transmitting at maximum power. We have experimentally evaluated the benefit of the proposed power control scheme when compared with fixed power level systems. We show that our ConTPC mechanism can increase the throughput, however the magnitude of this enhancement largely depends on the topology of the wireless network.