A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is one consisting of a set of mobile hosts which can operate independently without infrastructure base stations. Power saving is a critical issue for MANET since most mobile hosts will be operated by battery power. In this paper, we address the power-saving issue for IEEE 802.11-based MANET from several protocol layers, including physical, MAC, and network layers. Our solution is fully power-aware and location-aware in the sense that it exploits location information of mobile hosts to achieve energy conservation on all these protocol layers. In comparison, existing protocols only exploit location information in limited layers (e.g., power control, power mode management, power-aware MAC, and power-aware routing). Similar to cellular networks, our approach is based on partitioning the network area into squares/hexagons, thus leading to a powerful energy and mobility management capability.

Power-saving is a critical issue for almost all kinds of portable devices. In this paper, we consider the design of power-saving protocols for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) that allow mobile hosts to switch to a low-power sleep mode. The MANETs being considered in this paper are characterized by unpredictable mobility, multi-hop communication, and no clock synchronization mechanism. In particular, the last characteristic would complicate the problem since a host has to predict when another host will wake up to receive packets. We propose three power management protocols, namely dominating-awake-interval, periodically-fully-awake-interval, and quorum-based protocols, which are directly applicable to IEEE 802.11-based MANETs. As far as we know, the power management problem for multi-hop MANETs has not been seriously addressed in the literature. Existing standards, such as IEEE 802.11, HIPERLAN, and Bluetooth, all assume that the network is fully connected or there is a clock synchronization mechanism. Extensive simulation results are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed protocols.