Combating Interference in Power Control MAC Protocol for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

The limitation in battery power is now becoming a critical problem for the efficiency and performance of Wireless Ad Hoc Networks. A transmit power control protocol is proposed which considers limited power to transmit the packets to receiver node unaffected by the wastage of energy due to collisions and retransmissions of lost packets because of hidden nodes and interfering nodes existing within the interference range of the receiver. In this paper, an effort has been made to avoid the Interference range based problem and hidden node problem by analyzing the relationship between Interference Range and Carrier Sense Range of the sender and receiver by selecting the optimal transmission power of nodes in such a way that hidden nodes and the nodes within the interference range of the receiver cannot interfere with the reception of data packets at the receiver. This process conserves the dissipated power of the nodes as well as ameliorates the throughput of the network. To accomplish this, we adopt a model that characterizes the IEEE 802.11 DCF's transmission activities. The simulation results verifies the improvement in energy conservation as well in throughput, hence, improving the performance of the ad hoc network.