Coordinated power conservation for ad hoc networks

Existing ad hoc routing protocols assume all nodes within the network to participate in the routing process. By conditionally selecting a subset of nodes is an appropriate approach to limiting the number of nodes participating in routing such that nodes not selected may be turned off to conserve power and extend network lifetime. However, not all non-routing-related nodes will be able to be turned off (suspended) at the same time. Sufficient bandwidth and forwarding capacity are still necessary in case of changing network topology and environment. We describe the coordinated power conservation (CPC) algorithm to facilitate power conservation for ad hoc networks. The algorithm constructs a backbone infrastructure to have CPC servers running on backbone nodes to coordinate suspending schedules among their local non-backbone nodes running CPC clients. Simulation results demonstrate that CPC-enabled ad hoc networks exhibit performance closely equivalent to ad hoc networks without CPC, while consuming less power.