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Investigating the Energy Consumption of a Wireless

Network Interface in an Ad Hoc Networking

Environment

Laura Marie Feeney, Martin Nilsson

Abstract—Energy-aware design and evaluation of network protocols requires knowledge of the energy consumption behavior of actual wireless

interfaces. But little practical information is available about the energy

consumption behavior of well-known wireless network interfaces and device specifications do not provide information in a form that is helpful to

protocol developers. This paper describes a series of experiments which obtained detailed measurements of the energy consumption of an IEEE 802.11

wireless network interface operating in an ad hoc networking environment.

The data is presented as a collection of linear equations for calculating the

energy consumed in sending, receiving and discarding broadcast and pointto-point data packets of various sizes. Some implications for protocol design

and evaluation in ad hoc networks are discussed.

Keywords—energy consumption, IEEE 802.11, ad hoc networks

I. I NTRODUCTION

Because mobile devices are dependent on battery power, it is

important to minimize their energy consumption. The energy

consumption of the network interface can be significant, especially for smaller devices. Most research in energy conservation strategies has targeted wireless networks that are structured

around base stations and centralized servers, which do not have

the limitations associated with small, portable devices.

By contrast, an ad hoc network is a group of mobile, wireless

hosts which cooperatively form a network independently of any

fixed infrastructure. The multi-hop routing problem in ad hoc

networks has been widely studied in terms of bandwidth utilization, but energy consumption has received less attention. It is

sometimes (incorrectly) assumed that bandwidth utilization and

energy consumption are roughly synonymous. Recently, there

has been some study of energy-aware ad...