An Energy-Aware Geographic Routing Algorithm for Mobile Ad Hoc Network

Geographic routing, which is composed of greedy routing and perimeter routing, has been widely hailed owning to its efficiency and scalability. However, greedy forwarding always takes the local shortest path so that it has a problem of depleting the energy of nodes on the shortest path. The matter get worse when the nodes located on the boundaries of node holes suffer from excessive energy consumption, since the geographic routing tend to deliver data packets along the boundaries by perimeter routing. The imbalance of energy consumption may lead to a short network lifetime. In this paper, we present a novel energy-aware geographic routing (EGR) algorithm for mobile ad hoc network, which combines local position information and residual energy level to make routing decisions. In basic mode, it selects relay nodes with more residual energy. In void handling mode, a energy-based right-hand rule is proposed to balance consumption during perimeter routing. Our simulation shows that EGR exhibits noticeably longer network lifetime and higher delivery rate than some geographic routing algorithms, such as GPSR and GEAR.