A Power Management Protocol for Multi-Hop Ad Hoc Networks

Extending system lifetime by effectively managing power on participating nodes is critical in wireless ad hoc networks. One critical issue for almost all kinds of wireless devices supported by battery powers is power saving (PS). The PS protocols for MANET can be categorized into synchronous and asynchronous ones. The synchronous PS protocol can not be applied to a multi-hop MANET, because it will cause three problems: namely clock synchronization, neighbor discovery, and network partitioning. Although asynchronous solutions are attractive, yet, the cost is high as opposed to synchronous protocols. In this paper,we propose a cluster-based semi-asynchronous PS protocols for multi-hop MANETs. The basic idea is to cluster neighboring hosts such that synchronous PS protocols can be adopted within each individual clusters, and thus conserves more power. Simulation results show that, the proposed semi-asynchronous approaches outperform the asynchronous PS protocols when applied to a multi-hop MANET.