Non cooperative power control game for wireless ad hoc networks

Transmission power control is an important issue in wireless ad hoc networks due to its dependency on battery power. It is a tendency of ad hoc nodes to transmit at their maximum power level to ensure successful delivery of their packets which causes interference to other neighboring nodes. In response, the other nodes also increase their power level which creates a situation of cascading effect where all nodes drain their battery power. In this paper, the cascading effect of interference caused by neighboring nodes and its impact on battery power in wireless ad hoc networks is analyzed and a non cooperative power control game is proposed to obtain an optimum power at which the nodes can maximize their utility without compromising the quality of services. The concept of game theory is also applied to determine an optimum SNIR that is the same value for all the nodes in networks for their mutual benefit. Through the numerical examples it is shown that the proposed concept obtains the maximum utility by minimizing the transmission power.