Spectrum and Energy Efficient Medium Access Control for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

The increasingly growing number of mobile devices and volume of mobile data traffic necessitate establishing an effective self-organizing wireless ad hoc network to efficiently utilize radio spectrum and energy. The transmissions time and bandwidth should be dynamically coordinated based on instantaneous traffic load of the links in the network. Energy consumption in a mobile device can be reduced by putting the radio interface into a sleep mode. However, the mobile device cannot receive incoming data packets in the sleep mode. Thus, awake and sleep times of radio interfaces should be carefully planned to avoid missing incoming packets. In a wireless network, links that are far apart in distance can simultaneously transmit using the same bandwidth without interfering reception at destination nodes. Concurrent transmissions should be properly scheduled to maximize spatial spectrum utilization. Also, the transmission power level of each link should be optimized to enhance spectrum and energy efficiencies.

First, we present a new energy-efficient medium access control (MAC) scheme for a fully connected wireless ad hoc network. Energy consumption is reduced by periodically putting radio interfaces in the sleep mode and by reducing transmission collisions. The network throughput and average packet transmission delay are also improved because of lower collision and contention overhead. The proposed MAC scheme can achieve energy saving for realtime traffic which requires a low packet transmission delay. An analytical model is established to evaluate the performance of the proposed MAC scheme. Analytical and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme has a significantly lower energy consumption, achieves higher throughput, and has a lower packet transmission delay in comparison with existing power saving MAC protocols.

Second, we present a novel distributed MAC scheme based on dynamic space-reservation to effectively coordinate transmissions in a wireless ad hoc network. A set of coordinator nodes distributed over the network area are employed to collect and exchange local network information and to periodically schedule links for transmission in a distributed manner. For each scheduled transmission, a proper space area around the receiver node is reserved to enhance spatial spectrum reuse. Also, the data transmission times are deterministic to minimize idle-listening radio interface energy consumption. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves substantially higher throughput and has significantly lower energy consumption in comparison with existing schemes.

We study joint scheduling and transmission power control in a wireless ad hoc network. We analyze the asymptotic joint optimal scheduling and transmission power control, and determine the maximum spectrum and energy efficiencies in a wireless network. Based on the asymptotic analysis, we propose a novel scheduling and transmission power control scheme to approach the maximum spectrum efficiency, subject to an energy consumption constraint. Simulation results show that the proposed distributed scheme achieves 40% higher throughput than existing schemes. Indeed, the scheduling efficiency of our proposed scheme is about 70% of the asymptotic optimal scheduling and transmission power control. Also, the energy consumption of the proposed scheme is about 20% of the energy consumed using existing MAC protocols.

The proposed MAC, scheduling and transmission power control schemes provide effective spectrum sharing and energy management for future wireless hotspot and peer-to-peer communication networks. The presented asymptotic analysis determines the maximum spectrum and energy efficiencies in a wireless network and provides an effective means to efficiently utilize spectrum and energy resources based on network traffic load and energy consumption constrains.