Energy-aware congestion-less dynamic source routing for MANETs

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a decentralized collection of mobile nodes without a pre-existing architecture. Routing protocols in MANETs opt for shortest paths for communication during the path selection process, which may lead to an unbalanced traffic flow across the network. This may also cause the network to face congestions, which affect the Quality of Service (QoS). Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) is one of the well-known protocols, which has been extended for tackling congestion in the network. However, such extensions either ignore the energy constraint of the nodes or are multipath approaches, which may incur excessive delays and have additional energy requirements. In this paper, we present a unified multi-metrics routing approach, namely, energy-aware congestion-less DSR (ECL-DSR). We consider routing in view of congestion and energy efficiency at the same time. The aim is to select a route to minimize the chances of congestion. The intelligent node selection process of ECL-DSR selects only suitable nodes in terms of energy and network load. The proposed approach not only stabilizes the network but it also increases the network lifetime by involving high-energy nodes in communications. Simulation results demonstrate that ECL-DSR not only guarantees long lasting communication but it also decreases the routing overhead by offering unipath routing.