PCAR: A power controlled routing protocol for wireless ad hoc networks

Power control and routing are two fundamental supporting techniques for wireless communications in ad hoc networks. However, most existing power control and routing proposals are not really efficient enough, due to separate considerations on them. In this paper, motivated by the observation on the necessity and feasibility of the combination of power control and routing, we propose a power controlled routing protocol PCAR (Power Controlled Ad hoc Routing). The basic idea is to develop power control on top of the distance-vector routing mechanism that is based on the classical distributed Bellman-Ford algorithm. Each node adjusts the transmission power automatically through the PIPC (Proportion-Integral Power Control) algorithm that we previously proposed. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results show that PCAR has a good performance.