Power-Conservative Designs in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

Since the basic components of ad hoc wireless networks are mostly battery-operated portable devices, power conservation is one of the central issues of such networks. Power-conservative designs for ad hoc networks pose many challenges due to the lack of central coordination facilities. The purpose of this chapter is to offer a comprehensive discussion of the power-conservative issues for mobile ad hoc networks. We generally divide power-conservative protocols into two categories: transmitter power control mechanisms and power management algorithms. The latter can be further classified into MAC-layer, network-layer, and higher-layer implementations. This chapter will present a variety of existing powerconservative designs for ad hoc networks in order, based on the above classification.