Wireless networks are technologies with a growing interest in the area of telecommunications, such as the case of MANETs. Despite its advantages, MANETs present several challenges in the transmission of information due to the limited bandwidth, high error rate, energy consumption restriction, and variable topologies. The transmission power can significant influence some of the aforementioned issues. This paper proposes DPCM (Density Power Control Mechanism), which employs a crosslayering approach between AODV (Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector) routing protocol and the physical layer to adapt power transmission. DPCM aims to reduce collisions, maintain or improve the performance of AODV as well as to save power in the nodes.
Our results indicate that our proposal can improve the performance of the network and save power at the same time. Moreover, it is especially useful for low and medium densities scenarios.