Power consumption is a crucial design concern in Wireless ad hoc networks since wireless nodes are typically battery limited. It might not be possible to replace/recharge a mobile node that is powered by batteries. To take full advantage of life time of nodes, traffic should be routed in a way that power consumption is minimized. Power Aware Routing is a consideration in a way that it minimizes the energy consumption while routing the traffic, aims at minimizing the total power consumption of all the nodes in the network, minimizing the overhead etc. and thus, at maximizing the lifespan of the network using some Power Aware Routing Protocols. They minimize either the active communication energy required to transmit or receive packets or the inactive energy consumed when a mobile node stays idle but listens to the wireless medium for any possible communication requests from other nodes. Transmission power control, load distribution and power management approaches are used to minimize active communication energy.

In this paper we develop a new multiaccess protocol for ad hoc radio networks. The protocol is based on the original MACA protocol with the adition of a separate signalling channel. The unique feature of our protocol is that it conserves battery power at nodes by intelligently powering off nodes that are not actively transmitting or receiving packets. The manner in which nodes power themselves off does not influence the delay or throughput characteristics of our protocol. We illustrate the power conserving behavior of PAMAS via extensive simulations performed over ad hoc networks containing 10-20 nodes. Our results indicate that power savings of between 10% and 70% are attainable in most systems. Finally, we discuss how the idea of power awareness can be built into other multiaccess protocols as well.

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