A Comprehensive Evaluation of Transmission Power Control on Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
Due to energy constraints on mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), networking protocols try to reduce energy consumption on the communication. Transmission power control (TPC) is one such technique, where nodes transmit frames at the minimum power necessary to reach the destination. Several studies evaluated the effects of TPC on MANETs, however their modeling of the physical and MAC layers usually does not correspond to the characteristics of real hardware. Important factors, such as collisions, the limited number of transmission powers, the capture effect and the dynamic selection of modulation and coding have not been taken into account. This article presents a comprehensive evaluation of TPC techniques considering the factors above to provide more realistic radio models. Results show that certain hardware and medium characteristics can be ignored, while the existence of a finite number of transmission levels must be considered in the model. We confirm the existence of a energy-latency trade-off on sensor networks, however we refute this trade-off on TPC-aware MANETs. Finally, we show that TPC-aware routing protocols for MANETs should minimize hop count instead of energy consumption, as opposed to existing TPC protocols.