A unified interference-collision analysis for power-aware adhoc networks

In this paper we address the issue of controlling transmission power in power-aware ad hoc networks. Previous work that minimizes the transmission power does not consider both the energy consumed in collision resolution and the energy disbursed to overcome the interference resulting from neighboring nodes. We investigate the basic transmission power control for the 802.11 MAC protocols in which the control frames and the data frames can be transmitted at different power levels. A collision model together with an interference model of a uniformly distributed network is constructed. Based on these models, the end-to-end network throughput and the total energy consumption of the network are examined. For a network with a given node density, our results show the optimal transmission power for control messages and for data messages that will yield maximum throughput and minimum energy consumption per message.