A Power Control MAC Protocol Based on Fragmentation for 802.11 Multi-hop Networks

In order to reduce energy consumption at the 802.11 based MAC layer for MANETs (Mobile Ad Hoc Networks), there exists an approach to use the maximum power during RTS-CTS exchange and compute the required amount of power in order for DATA and ACK messages to reach the receiver and sender. However, it does not consider the existence of an interference range, which results in a collision at sender. Although another approach forces nodes located within a sender’s interference range to defer their transmission trials in order to avoid collisions at the sender, it does not consider possible collisions at the receiver, which requires frequent retransmissions and hence greater energy consumption. In this paper, we propose an efficient protocol called F-PCM (Fragmentation-based Power Control MAC) which utilizes the fragmentation mechanism of the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol to avoid collisions at both sender and receiver. Extensive simulations show it has better performance in terms of higher throughput and lower energy consumption, particularly in a dense network environment with high collision.