A Study of Energy-efficient Routing Supporting Coordinated Sleep Scheduling in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

A wireless ad hoc network is a collection of wireless computing devices that self-configure to form a network independently of any fixed infrastructure. Many wireless ad hoc network devices such as smartphones and tablets are usually powered by batteries with a limited operation time. This poses a significant challenge to the design of low-power network protocols. On one hand, energy-efficient routing protocols are widely discussed to reduce the end-to-end transmission energy by controlling the transmission power at senders. Recently, opportunistic routing (OR) has attracted a lot of attention for maximizing energy efficiency by exploiting the gains of multi-receiver diversity. On the other hand, sleep scheduling is commonly adopted as an effective mechanism to further reduce power wasted in overhearing and idle listening. However, the prior work has mainly treated energy-efficient routing and sleep scheduling as two separate tasks, which leads to a serious problem that neither component can fully minimize the network-wide energy consumption. In this thesis, we study how energy-efficient routing can be coordinated with sleep scheduling to increase network-side energy efficiency. We identify a trade-off between the decreased transmit power at senders due to multi-receiver diversity and the increased power at forwarders with the incorporation of coordinated sleep scheduling. Moreover, we provide a comprehensive evaluation of coordinated sleep scheduling impact on energy-efficient routing performance based on a 2-D grid topology and time division multiple access (TDMA) medium access control (MAC). Extensive simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the integrated function of coordinated sleep scheduling, significant impact of coordinated sleep scheduling on the energy-efficient routing performance and relationship between the network conditions (in terms of the traffic load and node density) and overall system performance achieved by different energy-efficient routing protocols.