Modeling energy consumption in single-hop IEEE 802.11 ad hoc networks

This paper presents an analytical model to predict energy consumption in saturated IEEE 802.11 single-hop ad hoc networks under ideal channel conditions. The model we introduce takes into account the different operational modes of the IEEE 802.11 DCF MAC, and is validated against packet-level simulations. In contrast to previous works that attempted to characterize the energy consumption of IEEE 802.11 cards in isolated, contention-free channels (i.e., single sender/receiver pair), this paper investigates the extreme opposite case, i.e., when nodes need to contend for channel access under saturation conditions. In such scenarios, our main findings include: (1) contrary to what most previous results indicate, the radio´s transmit mode has marginal impact on overall energy consumption, while other modes (receive, idle, etc.) are responsible for most of the energy consumed; (2) the energy cost to transmit useful data increases almost linearly with the network size; and (3) transmitting large payloads is more energy efficient under saturation conditions