Energy Saving and Connectivity Tradeoff by Adaptative Transmission Range in 802.11g MANETs

Power conservation is a crucial problem in mobile ad hoc wireless networks knowing that, each mobile node has a limited amount of energy concentrated in a battery. The main objective of our paper is to use a variable transmission range in order to save some energy and to keep the connectivity of the network. Our algorithm is implemented at the data link layer of the OSI model and thus can be used by all MANET routing algorithms such as AOVD and DYMO. Simulation experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of our algorithm in terms of energy used and connectivity. We show that our algorithm has an energy gain between 35% to 85% at reasonable speeds below 20 m/s and a high enough network density.