Abstract
Despite the wide spread of interest to ad hoc networks and the rapid development in wireless communication technologies, energy consumption still remains a critical issue. The use of a low-power mode has been adopted by many approaches in the literature to conserve energy. It allows nodes to switch to the sleeping mode whenever possible to conserve energy. However, most of these approaches do not take into account the impact of such a mode on network capacity and performances. Combining the power saving mode and a clustering technique seems to be a promising approach.
In this paper, we present a power saving approach which relies on a virtual infrastructure formed by elected clusterheads and gateways to conserve network capacity. The main contribution lies on the differentiation among packets based on the amount of network resources they have been so far consumed. The proposed structure of the beacon interval can be adjusted dynamically and locally by each node according to its own specific requirements. The good performance of our algorithm in terms of more energy saving and better network throughput is witnessed by extensive simulations under various traffic loads.