Power mode scheduling for ad hoc networks

An ad hoc network is a group of mobile wireless nodes that cooperatively form a network among themselves without any fixed infrastructure. Increasingly, power consumption within ad hoc networks is becoming a core issue for these low-power mobile devices. This paper focuses on a novel approach for energy conservation within the routing protocol of the ad hoc network. A wireless network interface in sleep mode expends an order of magnitude less power than in idle mode, but no packets can be sent or received while in sleep mode. We propose two probabilistic algorithms for scheduling transition from idle mode to sleep mode. Performance evaluation of these strategies show a substantial reduction in power usage, with only a slight decrease in performance.