An Energy Efficient MAC Protocol for Fully Connected Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Energy efficiency is an important performance measure of wireless network protocols, especially for battery-powered mobile devices such as smartphones. This paper presents a new energy-efficient medium access control (MAC) scheme for fully connected wireless ad hoc networks. The proposed scheme reduces energy consumption by putting radio interfaces in the sleep state periodically and by reducing transmission collisions, which results in high throughput and low packet transmission delay. The proposed MAC scheme can also address the energy saving in realtime traffics which require very low packet transmission delay. An analytical model is established to evaluate the performance of the proposed MAC scheme. Analytical and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme has a significantly lower power consumption, achieves substantially higher throughput, and has lower packet transmission delay in comparison with existing power saving MAC protocols.