Fast flooding in power save mode of IEEE 802.11 DCF based mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

We propose Fast Flooding in Power Save Mode (FFPSM), a modification of IEEE 802.11 power save mode operation for Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANET). The previous works for the power save mode operation usually focused on shortening the duration of the awake state to minimize the power consumption of mobile nodes. We observed that the longer sleeping period results in seriously long delivery latency because the packets can move forward only one hop for a fixed interval. Our FFPSM scheme allows the flooding packets to be forwarded several hops in a transmission period. Each node propagates the announcements for next flooding to nodes of several hops away, thus the packets can travel multiple hops during one interval. Simulation results show that the proposed approach significantly reduces the end-to-end delay of flooding without extra energy consumption.