An Enhanced IEEE 802.11 MAC Algorithm for Tradeoff between Delay and Energy-Consumption

One of the most crucial requirements of a wireless ad-hoc network is to work efficiently and reliably over a long period of time. It is important to design a control technique that minimizes the transmission power of each mobile node without losing much of the performance while retaining the fairness of the network. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we show that the transmission energy consumption and the media access delay can be expressed as a function of the conditional collision probability in the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. Based on the analyses, a fundamental tradeoff between the system energy consumption and its performance can be found by tuning up the system control parameter CWmin. Second, we propose an enhanced energy-aware scheme based on the IEEE 802.11 protocol. The simulation results show that this technique is more energy efficient than the original IEEE 802.11 protocol while keeping a similar media access delay and a better fairness.