Seminario Interdipartimentale di Algoritmica
 
 

DI - Department of Computer Science
Seminar Room, third floor

Abstract:

Energy management remains a critical problem in ad hoc networks since battery technology cannot keep up with rising demands in wireless communications. Current approaches to energy conservation focus primarily on reducing the energy consumption of the wireless interface either for a given communication task or during idling. However, these communication-time and idle-time approaches are not necessarily complementary. Therefore, we discuss the details of both types of approaches and then explore the interactions between them. Given the complexity of these interactions, we present a simple, yet very effective, heuristic approach to minimize total energy consumption that optimizes first for idle-time energy and then for communication-time energy. Although managing the energy spent during communication is key to effective energy conservation, it is also necessary to minimize the control overhead caused by node and route instability. Our approach to this problem is to support energy efficient local route recovery. The final piece of the puzzle is how all of these approaches affect the lifetime of the network. Since such network lifetime is highly dependent on the needs of the applications running on the network, we discuss several definitions of network lifetime and show the impact of our approaches.