Quantitative µ-calculus analysis of power management in wireless networks

Abstract. An important concern in wireless network technology is battery conservation. A promising approach to saving energy is to allow nodes periodically to enter a “low power mode”, however this strategy contributes to message delay, and careful management is required so that the system-wide performance is not severely compromised. Moreover the management of low/high power schedules is particularly difficult due to the uncertainties caused by message collisions and clock drift. In this paper we show how to manage the low/high power scheduling in network nodes so that the time spent in the low power mode is optimised relative to the cost of message delay. Our approach is to use the quantitative modal µ-calculus which allows the specification of a quantitative performance property as a game in which a maximising player’s optimal strategy corresponds to the optimal low/high power schedule. We extend the standard results on discounted games to infinite state systems, and illustrate our results on a small case study