Abstract

Wireless networks have become an indispensable component of almost any communication systems. In particular, there has been a growing interest in wireless ad hoc networks, where no centralized management is required and therefore, they can be set up and become operational in almost no time. Due to the shared nature of the wireless channels and the existence of high co-channel interference in wireless ad hoc networks, the role of the transmission control algorithms such as power control and admission control schemes becomes extremely important. Power control algorithms manage the power allocation process and admission control algorithms grant network access to a new link while protecting the transmission quality of other links. Because of the distributed nature of ad hoc networks, the transmission control algorithms have to be also distributed and should not rely on any information to be provided at the network level. In this work, new transmission control algorithms for power-controlled ad hoc networks are investigated where each algorithm is designed to achieve a specific performance objective. In particular, an autonomous power control algorithm is proposed to achieve the maximum uniform signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SIR) of the network. Moreover, an asynchronous power control with active link protection is introduced which allows the links to update their powers asynchronously and at the same time, guarantees the target SIR of the existing links when a new link enters the network. Furthermore, a novel distributed admission control algorithm is proposed which can be used as an add-on module to most of the asynchronous power control algorithms and delivers an ideal admission decision. Finally, the feasible SIR region is investigated which can be considered as the upper bound for the achievable rates of any transmission control algorithm.