Distributed Power Control in Wireless Networks

Abstract

The main characteristics of wireless networks are the scarce radio resource and the limited battery of mobile stations or wireless sensors. The capacity of a power controlled wireless network can be changing due to user's mobility, fading or shadowing effects. As a result, the quality of service (QOS) of all users may not be guaranteed in a wireless network. In this study, we propose a two-phase distributed subset selection algorithm to identify a subset of wireless users whose QOS is guaranteed. In the first phase, it finds a basic feasible set, and then it tries to expand the basic feasible set in the second phase. For starvation prevention, we discuss conflict resolution in the power domain and in the time domain. Through simulations we evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme in terms of the number of average feasible links, the average execution time and maximum of the cycle time. In the study of cross-layer design, we consider the wireless sensor networks since wireless sensor networks attract more and more attention due to being capable of monitoring the environment. Since wireless sensor nodes typically have limited energy and power, power efficiency is a main concern in designing protocols for wireless sensor networks. Data aggregation is one of the strategies that can reduce the power consumption in wireless sensor networks. In this study, we propose a distributed cross- layer algorithm with data aggregation to minimize the power consumption. Most importantly, our proposed algorithm is distributed and therefore, it is suitable for wireless sensor networks. From numerical results, we conclude that not all data packets should be aggregated before they arrive the destination nodes. In addition, we evaluate the performance of our proposed algorithm in the network lifetime.