Abstract
We investigate the impact of power control on latency in wireless ad-hoc networks. If transmission power is increased, interference increases, thus reducing network capacity. A node sending/relaying delay-sensitive real-time application traffic can, however, use a higher power level to reduce latency, if it considers information about load and channel contention at its neighboring nodes. Based on this observation, we formulate a new distributed power control protocol, Load-Aware Power Control (LAPC), that heuristically considers low end-to-end latency when selecting power levels. We study the performance of LAPC via simulations, varying the network density, node dispersion patterns, and traffic load. Our simulation results demonstrate that LAPC achieves an average end-to-end latency improvement of 54\% over the case when nodes are transmitting at the highest power possible, and an average end-to-end latency improvement of 33\% over the case when nodes are transmitting using the lowest power possible, for uniformly dispersed nodes in a lightly loaded network.
