Improving the Performance of Multi-Hop Wireless Networks by Selective Transmission Power Control

In a multi-hop wireless network, connectivity is determined by the link that is established by the receiving signal strength computed by subtracting the path loss from the transmission power. Two path loss models are commonly used in research, namely two-ray ground and shadow fading, which determine the receiving signal strength and affect the link quality. Link quality is one of the key factors that affect network performance. In general, network performance improves with better link quality in a wireless network. In this study, we measure the network connectivity and performance in a shadow fading path loss model, and our observation shows that both are severely degraded in this path loss model. To improve network performance, we propose power control schemes utilizing link quality to identify the set of nodes required to adjust the transmission power in order to improve the network throughput in both homogeneous and heterogeneous multi-hop wireless networks. Numerical studies to evaluate the proposed schemes are presented and compared.