Power saving protocol based on rectangular grid quorums for IEEE 802.11 ad hoc networks

Energy conservation is one of the most important issues in wireless communication networks. Many power saving methods have been proposed in the literature. Among them, approaches based on the grid quorum systems are common. In a grid quorum based power saving protocol, the grid size is an important factor to the sleep ratio. A larger grid size implies a higher sleep ratio and hence less power consumption, but, on the other hand, it will lead to longer neighbor discovery time. To tackle this dilemma, this study proposed a power saving protocol based on rectangular grid quorums for wireless ad hoc networks. The proposed protocol dynamically adjusts the row sizes of the rectangular grid quorums according to different traffic load conditions so as to effectively conserve power. Simulation results show that the proposed approach can reduce the neighbor discovery time while achieving higher sleep ratio than those of the other existing related approaches.