Distributed power management protocols for multi-hop mobile ad hoc networks

The power management scheme in IEEE 802.11 protocol has three severe challenges: beacon contention, timing synchronization, and reliable neighbor maintenance. These challenges are more serious in large and dense multi-hop mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). To overcome these challenges and improve the energy efficiency as well as network throughput, we propose three new power management protocols. Especially, our solutions offer the network designers full flexibility in trading energy, latency, and neighbor maintenance's accuracy versus each other by appropriately tuning system parameters. Analyses and simulations show that the proposed protocols attain both the better energy efficiency and throughput than existing protocols.