Figure: Basic experimental setup for transmit power control implementation on wireless sensor nodes

The main goal of the project was to investigate various power saving measures in wireless ad hoc sensor networks via novel network protocols and their optimizations. The effect of transmit power control was proposed to be analytically studied by evaluating the optimized network protocols at the channel access, link layer transmission, and network-level. Next major objective was to implement and evaluate the automatic transmit power control protocols at the node level.
The key contributions of our experimental studies are: a) dynamic frame size control implementation as a power saving measure; b) implementation of optimized frame repeat window and transmit power adaptation; and c) implementation of joint transmit power and frame size control in a dynamically changing environment around a given transmitter-receiver pair to minimize the effective energy consumption. The proposed power control strategies can be implemented in the actual sensor as well as ad hoc network nodes for energy-efficient communications.