Adaptive power control for single channel ad hoc networks

Power control for mobile ad hoc networks has received increasing interest in recent years by the research community. Power control can be invoked to achieve different objectives, among which the most popular goals of either increasing the network throughput by mitigating the effects of interference on a node or ensuring minimal power consumption. In this paper, we propose a power control algorithm for ad hoc networks to improve network throughput. As such, we study and exploit the correlation that exists between the appropriate transmit power of successive RTS, CTS, DATA and ACK frames and propose an adaptive power control algorithm in the framework of the IEEE802.11 MAC protocol. As opposed to some alternative approaches our algorithm operates in a single channel and does not require additional hardware support, which makes it very appropriate for the existing IEEE 802.11 based networks.