Improving the battery performance of ad-hoc routing protocols

In ad-hoc networks formed by battery powered nodes, the network lifetime can be significantly enhanced by incorporating the battery properties in the routing protocol. In this paper, we propose such a routing mechanism BCRM, that enhances the network lifetime by letting some of the nodes recover part of their lost charge. This is done by putting the selected set of nodes to sleep. We integrate BCRM into well-known on-demand protocols such as DSR, MBCR and MMBCR, and evaluate their performance. Simulation results show that BCRM based protocols can improve network lifetime significantly with slight degradation in throughput.