Adaptive Quorum: A Traffic Aware Power Saving Mechanism for Multi-hop Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

In this paper we propose a method for adaptive power saving based on Cyclic Quorum method. Quorum based protocols can make a guarantee for upper delay bounds which a node can experience before it can see the next hop in active state. These methods are useful for multi-hop ad-hoc networks which do not have any global synchronization between their nodes. We try to make Cyclic Quorum protocol adaptive to changes in traffic condition of network. We have shown that using Adaptive Quorum, nodes can be power conservative up to 3.5 times more than IEEE 802.11 in low traffic conditions. This method presents throughput and delay efficiencies to be very close to what network can experience while nodes are always on. This method also considers different quality of service requirements for making decisions to change the power efficiency. Independency of MAC layer from other network layers is also observed and therefore no information is needed from routing layer.