Cluster based prioritized power conservation mechanism

The large deployment of ad hoc networks is already throttled by the slow advancement of battery technology. In fact, wireless devices usually rely on portable power sources such as batteries to provide the necessary power. The use of low-power mode was adopted by many approaches in the literature to conserve energy. However, most of these approaches do not take account of the impact of such mode on network capacity and performances. In this paper, we present a synchronous power saving approach which relies on a virtual infrastructure formed by elected clusterheads and gateways to conserve network capacity. The main contribution lies on the differentiation between processed packets based on the amount of resources so far consumed. The good performance of our algorithm in terms of more energy saving and better network throughput is witnessed by extensive simulations under various traffic loads.