Dynamic power budget distribution schemes that optimise connection lifetimes in MANETs

We present new dynamic power control schemes that continuously redistribute a fixed power budget among a set of mobile wireless nodes participating in a multi-hop wireless connection or 'route'. The schemes operate with the objective of maximising the expected lifetime of the connection in the face of node movement. We evaluate the performance gain of the proposed schemes relative to each other and two previously known schemes (i.e. Uniform and MinBER). Firstly, we consider the problem both with and without considerations of control traffic and protocol convergence times. We quantify the sensitivity of the gains in connection lifetime achieved, to various system parameters including connection size, node density, power budget size and mean node velocities. Our simulations indicate that the proposed power budget distribution schemes yield significant increases in expected connection lifetimes, even when control traffic overhead is taken into consideration.