A Deterministic Power Management Protocol with Dynamic Listen Interval for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

In IEEE 802.11 wireless ad hoc networks, the listen interval of a power-saving (PS) station should be fixed at one even there is no data traffic or its remaining battery power is low. However, if the listen interval is allowed more than two beacon intervals, 802.11 power management may completely fail. Hence we propose a new novel adaptive power management protocol, called APM, which not only equips the PS stations with dynamic listen interval adjustment ability, but also conquers the following problems: (i) the possibly forever loss of ATIM frames, (ii) the needless waste of ATIM frames, and (iii) neighbor maintenance problem. Above all, APM offers the PS station full flexibility in trading energy and latency by appropriately setting the listen interval and idle duty cycle. The primary numerical results demonstrate that APM attains better energy efficiency than existing protocols, including IEEE 802.11 and AQEC (Chao et al., 2006).