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

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

On Energy Efficient Hierarchical Cross-Layer Design: Joint Power Control and Routing for Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper, a hierarchical cross-layer design approach is proposed to increase energy efficiency in ad hoc networks through joint adaptation of nodes' transmitting powers and route selection. The design maintains the advantages of the classic OSI model, while accounting for the cross-coupling between layers, through information sharing. The proposed joint power control and routing algorithm is shown to increase significantly the overall energy efficiency of the network, at the expense of a moderate increase in complexity. Performance enhancement of the joint design using multiuser detection is also investigated, and it is shown that the use of multiuser detection can increase the capacity of the ad hoc network significantly for a given level of energy consumption.Comment: To appear in the EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, Special Issue on Wireless Mobile Ad Hoc Network

Towards Optimal Distributed Node Scheduling in a Multihop Wireless Network through Local Voting

In a multihop wireless network, it is crucial but challenging to schedule transmissions in an efficient and fair manner. In this paper, a novel distributed node scheduling algorithm, called Local Voting, is proposed. This algorithm tries to semi-equalize the load (defined as the ratio of the queue length over the number of allocated slots) through slot reallocation based on local information exchange. The algorithm stems from the finding that the shortest delivery time or delay is obtained when the load is semi-equalized throughout the network. In addition, we prove that, with Local Voting, the network system converges asymptotically towards the optimal scheduling. Moreover, through extensive simulations, the performance of Local Voting is further investigated in comparison with several representative scheduling algorithms from the literature. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves better performance than the other distributed algorithms in terms of average delay, maximum delay, and fairness. Despite being distributed, the performance of Local Voting is also found to be very close to a centralized algorithm that is deemed to have the optimal performance