A battery aware medium access control (BAMAC) protocol for ad hoc wireless networks

Abstract

One of the challenging issues in the energy-constrained ad hoc wireless networks is to find ways that increase their lifetime. Squeezing maximum energy from the battery of the nodes of these networks requires, the communication protocols to be designed such that they are aware of the state of the batteries. Traditional ad hoc wireless MAC protocols are designed without considering the battery state. We propose a novel battery aware medium access control (BAMAC) protocol that takes benefit of the chemical properties of the batteries to provide the longest life for the mobile nodes' battery. The proposed protocol extends the battery lifetime consuming 70% and 21% less percentage nominal capacity of the battery per packet transmission compared to the IEEE 802.11 and the DWOP (distributed wireless ordering protocol) respectively. A discrete chain Markov model is used to theoretically analyze the battery behavior. We have provided a detailed simulation study on the performance and the results show that BAMAC outperforms DWOP and IE EE 802.11 MAC protocols, in terms of power consumption, fairness, and lifetime of the nodes.