A power control MAC protocol for ad hoc networks

This paper presents a power control MAC protocol that allows nodes to vary transmit power level on a per-packet basis. Several researchers have proposed simple modifications of IEEE 802.11 to incorporate power control. The main idea of these power control schemes is to use different power levels for RTS-CTS and DATA-ACK. Specifically, maximum transmit power is used for RTS-CTS, and the minimum required transmit power is used for DATA-ACK transmissions in order to save energy. However, we show that these schemes can degrade network throughput and can result in higher energy consumption than when using IEEE 802.11 without power control. We propose a power control protocol which does not degrade throughput and yields energy saving.