Adaptive power control for single channel ad hoc networks

Power control for mobile ad hoc networks has received increasing interest from the research community. Power control can be invoked to achieve different objectives, including the most popular goals of either increasing the network throughput by mitigating the effects of interference on a node or ensuring minimal power consumption. We propose a power control algorithm for ad hoc networks to improve network throughput. As such, we study and exploit the correlation that exists between the appropriate transmit power of successive RTS, CTS, DATA and ACK frames and propose an adaptive power control algorithm in the framework of the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. In contrast to some alternative approaches, our algorithm operates in a single channel and does not require additional hardware support, which makes it very appropriate for existing IEEE 802.11 based networks.