An energy-efficient MAC protocol based on IEEE 802.11 in wireless ad hoc networks

Energy efficiency is a measure of the performance of IEEE 802.11 wireless multihop ad hoc networks. The IEEE 802.11 standard, currently used in wireless multihop ad hoc networks, wastes bandwidth capacity and energy resources because of many collisions. Therefore, controlling the contention window size at a given node will increase not only the operating life of the battery but also the overall system capacity. It is essential to develop effective backoff schemes for saving power in IEEE 802.11 wireless multihop ad hoc networks. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient backoff scheme and evaluate its performance in an ad hoc network. Our contention window mechanism devised by us grants a node access to a channel on the basis of the node’s percentage of residual energy. We use both an analytical model and simulation experiments to evaluate the effective performance of our scheme in an ad hoc network. Our extensive ns-2-based simulation results have shown that the proposed scheme provides excellent performance in terms of energy goodput, end-to-end goodput, and packet delivery ratio, as well as the end-to-end delay.