Measuring network performance of swarm power aware routing protocol for MANETs

The huge growth in wireless communication and increase in user mobility have introduced new challenges, such as the need to make efficient use of power resources besides preserving good network characteristics. Power resources as well as processing power are constrained in an ad hoc network. Overlooking the limitation of resources in an Ad hoc network might result in a sharp degradation in the network services. The objective of our work is to observe the effect of incorporating power awareness and load balancing techniques on network performance parameters: throughput, packet delivery ratio and routing overhead. The protocol developed is a swarm-based routing protocol that incorporated both power awareness and load balancing techniques. PowerAnt provided more throughput by 11% on average; besides, it provided better packet delivery ratio by 15% compared with AODV.