A location-aware power saving mechanism based on quorum systems for multi-hop mobile ad hoc networks

IEEE 802.11 specifies a Power Saving Mode (PSM) in order to save the consumption of energy or power for mobile stations in wireless ad hoc networks. Following the standard of PSM, a number of studies [1-5] further discussed the wake-up/sleep scheduling of beacon intervals based on Quorum systems so that any communication pair of stations has common awake intervals for data exchange. However, most of them did not take into consideration the fact that non-neighbor stations did not require common wake up intervals since they were unable to communicate with each other. Hence, the energy conservation and the transmission delay could not be significantly improved. This paper utilizes the location information and proposes a location-aware power saving mechanism. In the proposed scheme, the network area is partitioned into regular hexagon cells and every station determines the basic quorum intervals based on its cell location information such that only neighboring cells have common beacon intervals for data exchange. In addition, a collision avoidance strategy is proposed to improve the network throughput. Experiment results reveal that the proposed scheme outperforms existing approaches in terms of energy conservation and transmission delay.