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The mobile ad hoc network (MANET) has become a popular technology in recent years. Due to most devices are battery powered, energy conservation is a critical issue in the MANET. To save energy and extend battery life, nodes should turn their radios off when they have no packet to send or receive. To achieve this, IEEE 802.11 defined a synchronous power saving mechanism (PSM) based on periodical beacon transmission. It allows devices to turn their radios off when no data has to be sent or received. However, the idle state is long because the device must remain awake during the entire beacon interval even though there is only a small amount of data packets to be sent. Although some PSMs have been proposed, they still suffer from a long idle state. In this paper, we propose a new power saving mechanism by dynamically adjusting the sleeping time based on the network traffic. Simulation results show that the proposed PSM outperforms other PSMs in energy goodput and lifetime.