A power adapted MAC (PAMAC) scheme for energy saving in wireless ad hoc networks

Nowadays, numerous Medium Access Control (MAC) contention protocols for ad hoc networks typically use a fixed transmit power level without using any transmit power control. In this paper, we present an enhancement scheme, called Power Adapted Medium Access Control (PAMAC) scheme for achieving energy conservation, which allows a node to vary its own transmit power on a packet basis. The primary objective of this scheme is to use suitable transmit power level for Clear-To-Send (CTS), DATA, and Acknowledgement (ACK) that still allows to achieve a correct reception of a packet despite intervening path loss, noise and interference. The evaluation of the throughput efficiency per node, energy consumption per node and energy per successfully transmitted bit is performed by a computer simulation. Simulation results indicate that the proposed PAMAC scheme can achieve a high reduction of the energy consumption and energy per successfully transmitted bit and also an improvement in the throughput efficiency per node compared to the conventional Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) protocol.