A robust and energy efficient protocol for random walk in ad hoc networks with IEEE 802.11

This paper is about energy efficient and robust implementation of random walks in mobile wireless networks. While random walk based algorithm are often proposed to solve many problems in wireless networks, their implementation is usually done at the application layer so that many characteristics of the wireless transmissions are not exploited. In this paper we show that we can greatly reduce the energy requirements to perform a walk by better exploiting the broadcast nature of the transmissions. We propose a robust, energy efficient distributed next hop selection algorithm. To evaluate the algorithm we present a simulation study performed with ns-2. We found that in the proposed algorithm energy is reduced to more than 4 times and the selection delay is reduced to more than 8 times as compared to a standard next hop selection implementation.