A New Quorum-Based Power Saving Protocol to Maintain QoS for MANETs with Burst Traffics

In this paper we address the Quality of Service (QoS) issues for applications such as voice and video that generate bursty traffic in mobile ad hoc networks while asynchronous power saving protocols are applied to wireless hosts. To provide QoS, we propose our new quorum-based power saving protocol called "consecutive quorum-based power saving (CQPS)". Within this torus-based protocol each host that has burst packets for a sleeping host informs the recipient about the duration of the successive burst packets with a control message (ATIM). The recipient adjusts its wakeup pattern such to be awake during the notified interval. At the same time it responds to received ATIM with an acknowledgement. The sending host will start to transmit all packets after it receives that acknowledgement. In addition, In CQPS, control messages such as ATIM/ACK are not exchanged before transmission of each packet and instead of sending ACK message after arriving each packet, the receiver acknowledge total burst packets with an ACK after reception of the last packet. This mechanism that is similar to block acknowledgement in IEEE 802.11e protocol results less protocol overhead. Our simulations in a MANET that utilize CQPS power saving protocol indicate fewer packet drops and more efficient energy conservation compared to previous quorum-based protocols like 802.11 power saving and AQEC.