Reception-Aware Routing for Energy Conservation in Ad Hoc Networks

Energy is a scarce resource in ad hoc mobile networks, making energy-aware communication crucial. In the absence of a central controlling entity and due to its dynamic network topology, the problem of controlling the network communications in an energy-efficient way is non-trivial in ad hoc networks. The problem is elevated due to the wireless nature of the communication, where a large amount of energy expenditure in the nodes is due to overhearing packets not meant for themselves. In this paper, we introduce battery-aware routing metrics which not only take care of the battery reserve in the nodes in the routes, but also the number of neighbors these nodes can potentially interfere, and the energy reserve of these neighbors, such that the energy due to overhearing is minimized throughout the network, specially when the neighbors are battery-deficient.