On the effects of transmit power control on the performance of wireless networks

Abstract

In this paper, we use a realistic energy consumption model for wireless networks to analyze the energy and bandwidth performance of wireless networks with transmit power control. Transmit power affects the performance at the physical layer. When the transmit power increases, the capacity at the physical layer increases accordingly, which reduces the energy consumption and increases throughput. Transmit power also affects the performance of the medium access control (MAC) layer. When the transmit power of nodes increases, contention for channel access increases, which leads to more energy consumption and lower throughput. An energy consumption model that is linked with the bandwidth performance analysis is crucial for understanding the performance of wireless networks. We propose a simple energy consumption model and analyze the energy-throughput tradeoff of distributed wireless network considering both the physical layer and the MAC layer. We show that there exist an optimal transmit power that achieves either the minimum energy consumption or maximum throughput.