An adaptive power controlled MAC protocol for wireless ad hoc networks

Transmission power control (TPC) has been extensively used not only to save energy, but also to improve the network throughput in wireless ad hoc networks. Among the existing throughput-oriented TPC protocols, many can achieve significant throughput improvement but have to use multiple channels and/or multiple transceivers, and others just require a single channel and a single transceiver but can only have limited throughput enhancement. In this paper, we propose a new adaptive transmission power control protocol, ATPMAC, which can improve the network throughput significantly using a single channel and a single transceiver. Specifically, by controlling the transmission power, ATPMAC can enable several concurrent transmissions without interfering with each other. Moreover, ATPMAC does not introduce any additional signalling overhead. We show by simulations that ATPMAC can improve the network throughput by up to 136% compared to IEEE 802.11 in a random topology.