Ad hoc routing for multilevel power save protocols

Designing energy-efficient protocols for ad hoc networks is important since there has been little improvement in the amount of energy stored on these devices. Previous work considers leaving a subset of nodes in a state with high energy consumption and low latency while the rest of the network remains in a power save state (i.e., low energy consumption and high latency). Our work is the first to generalize this concept for ad hoc networks by proposing the use of k levels of power save, each of which presents a different energy–latency tradeoff (i.e., a lower latency state requires more energy consumption). Thus, previous work only considered the case where k = 1 or k = 2. In this paper, we propose a link layer protocol to provide k levels of power save and a routing protocol to use this link layer effectively. Via simulation, we show that our protocols are able to maintain a desired end-to-end latency with a relatively low energy consumption.