Analysis of Power Control Mechanisms of MAC Protocol for wireless Sensor Networks

Power conservation is a major issue in wireless sensor networks, as most of the nodes are battery powered. Power control is not related to any particular layer, since we can apply power conservation methods in all layers. But most of the power control mechanisms are working in MAC layer. Here we analysis a Power Control MAC protocol for wireless sensor network with overall power consumption and improvement the throughput of the network. Thus our protocol includes two phases; in the first phase we reduce the power consumption and in the second phase we improve the aggregate throughput of the network. Our work is based on the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. We added an additional field to the RTS, ACK and CTS control packets for reducing the power consumption and throughput of the network. In the second phase we have to improve the throughput of the network. For that purpose we made some modifications in the virtual carrier sensing mechanism. In power control protocols, since nodes use different power for different transmissions, there is a chance to reduce the throughput of the entire network. A power control protocol can improve the throughput over IEEE 802.11 by creating better spatial reuse in the network. We use for above work done on QualNet 5.0 network simulator.