A Bi-Objective Power Aware Routing Algorithm for Personal Networks

Personal Network (PN) is a novel concept which facilitates anytime and anywhere interaction between the user and all the devices he owns them. Services are provided to the user of a PN by enabling multi-hop communication between his devices. Relaying traffic in multi-hop networks drains the battery of intermediate nodes quickly. Usually in a PN both battery-operated and mains-connected or grid-powered devices exist. We propose a bi-objective power aware routing algorithm for PNs that directs the relay traffic towards mains-connected devices, while keeping the number of hops minimal. The number of battery-operated nodes and the number of hops are the two routing metrics considered in our proposed bi-objective routing algorithm. We use lexicographic method and the weighted sum approach to solve the bi-objective optimization problem and to derive variants of the bi-objective routing algorithms. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm in terms of the resultant lifetime for the network and the average hop count of routes. Through extensive simulations we show that our scheme can significantly enhance the lifetime of battery-operated nodes while the hop count is kept close to its optimal value.