Do Not Lose Bandwidth: Adaptive Transmission Power and Multihop Topology Control

Abstract

We show that a multihop wireless network can achieve better bandwidth and routing stability when transmission power and routing topology are jointly and adaptively controlled. Our experiments show that the predominant 'fixed and uniform' transmission power strategy with 'link quality and hop distance'-based routing topology construction loses significant bandwidth due to hidden terminal and load imbalance problems. We design an adaptive and distributed control mechanism for transmission power and routing topology, PC-RPL, within the standard RPL routing protocol. We implement PC-RPL on real embedded devices and evaluate its performance on a 49-node multihop testbed. PC-RPL reduces total end to-end packet losses 7-fold without increasing hop distance compared to RPL with the highest transmission power at heavy load, resulting in 17% improvement in aggregate bandwidth and 64% for the worst-case node.