Implementation of Power Control in a Resource Constrained Wireless Ad-Hoc Network
D. Sylvia, Divvela Srinivasa Rao · 2015
Wireless ad-hoc networks have seen widespread usage due to their ease of implementation. Most of these devices are battery operated devices and therefore suffer from serious limitations in terms of power consumption. It becomes desirable to implement power aware routing schemes that minimises the power consumption and at the same time improves the traffic capacity of the network. The broadcast nature and the spatial diversity of the wireless communication is utilised efficiently in the opportunistic routing scheme and achieves improvement in the performance of the wireless networks. In contrast to the traditional routing scheme which makes use of a predetermined route for packet transmission, the opportunistic routing scheme defines a predefined forwarding candidate list formed by using single network metrics. In this paper, a protocol is proposed which uses multiple metrics such as residual energy and link quality for route selection. A variable power control algorithm is also implemented to transmit the packets at the optimal power level and therefore achieves considerable power saving in the resource constrained wireless ad-hoc environment. Using extensive simulations, we study the impact of variable power control on the network capacity, power saving and connectivity of the network.