Energy efficiency in wireless networks

Energy is a critical resource in the design of wireless networks since wireless devices are usually powered by batteries. Battery capacity is finite and the progress of battery technology is very slow, with capacity expected to make little improvement in the near future. Under these conditions, many techniques for conserving power have been proposed to increase battery life. In this dissertation we consider two approaches to conserving the energy consumed by a wireless network interface. One technique is to use power saving mode, which allows a node to power off its wireless network interface (or enter a doze state) to reduce energy consumption. The other is to use a technique that suitably varies transmission power to reduce energy consumption. These two techniques are closely related to theMAC (Medium Access Control) layer. With respect to power saving mode, we study IEEE 802.11 PSM (Power Saving Mechanism) and propose a scheme that improves its energy efficiency. We also investigate the interaction between power saving mode and TCP (Transport Control Protocol). As a second approach to conserving energy, we investigate a simple power control protocol, called BASIC, which uses the maximum transmission power for RTS-CTS and the minimum necessary power for DATA-ACK. We identify the deficiency of BASIC, which increases collisions and degrades network throughput, and propose a power control protocol that addresses these problems and achieves energy savings. Since energy conservation is not an issue limited to one layer of the protocol stack, we study a cross layer design that combines power control at the MAC layer and power aware routing at the network layer. One poweraware routing metric is minimizing the aggregate transmission power on a path from source to destination. This metric has been used along with BASIC-like power control under the assumption that it can save energy, which we show to be false. Also, we show that the power aware routing metric leads to a lower throughput. We show that using the shortest number of hops in conjunction with BASIC-like power control conserves more energy than power aware routing with BASIC-like power control.