A BSTRACT In this paper, a distributed power control mecha- nism for ad hoc networks is proposed and investigated. This mechanism, acting at different layers, reduces the power consumption maintaining similar behavior, in terms of delay and throughput, as classic schemes. In the proposed strategy, the generic sender uses an appro- priate power level to transmit its packets by reducing channel interference and energy consumption, and the final path is selected by minimizing the overall power spent in the end-to-end transmission. Two classic rout- ing schemes are revisited in order to apply to them this power consumption policy, by appropriately redefining the cost functions associated to each link. The effective- ness of this proposed distributed power control, which combines two power saving strategies working at two different levels, is shown by means of extensive simula- tion results.