Spatial Reuse Enabling Power Control MAC Protocol for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

As background power control is a determinant technique for energy conservation and thus is of fundamental importance to wireless ad hoc stations which primarily rely on limited battery power. Besides energy savings power control can also increase the capacity of the network by enhancing spatial reuse of the wireless channel. This is a novel Spatial Reuse MAC (SRM) protocol based on the IEEE standard 802.11. This protocol accomplishes spatial reuse without a separate control channel by employing a combination of power control and a fully distributed scheme of transmission sneaking. Other IEEE 802.11 based power control MAC protocols using omni-directional antennas concentrate their efforts in implementing efficient transmit power management schemes for the sake of energy efficiency. In general this is achieved by selecting different power levels for the RTS-CTS and DATA-ACK exchange where RTS-CTS are usually transmitted at the maximum possible power level whereas DATA-ACK are transmitted either at the minimum required power to reach the destination or at periodically changing power levels. However these protocols do not include any spatial reuse mechanism to efficiently reuse the extra capacity resulting from the low power level employed by the DATA-ACK exchange. Applications: MAC Protocol for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks