Delay-Sensitive and Power-Aware routing in wireless ad hoc networks

Power control in wireless ad hoc networks is very important and useful for its some application such as battlefield, where node battery recharging is usually impossible. However, it can not guarantee to provide a route with minimal network delay for data delivery due to bandwidth-constrained, variable-capacity links and dynamic topology and so on. Many ad hoc networks applications must resolve the inherent conflict between energy efficient communication and the need to achieve desired end-to-end network delay. To address this challenge, we propose a Delay-Sensitive and Power-Aware routing protocol (DSPA). This proposal builds different routing entries based on network delay from source to destination at different power levels on demand, and selects the minimum power level routing for data delivery. Moreover, DSPA uses different power control policies to transmit data packets, as well as the control packets of network layer and MAC layer. Simulation results show that our protocol can not only effectively reduce energy consumption, thus prolong the network lifetime, but also significantly improve average end-to-end delay while maintaining a good packet delivery ratio.