An improved AODVjr algorithm for extending network lifetime

Simple and flexible as AODVjr is, it is used in Zigbee mesh networks as the routing mechanism. To reduce and balance the network's energy consumption, many improved energy-aware routing algorithms have been presented based on AODVjr. However, they paid little attention to the excessive energy consumption of low-energy nodes caused by RREQ flooding which may result in network earlier death. To deal with this problem, we propose an improved energy-aware routing algorithm, EG-AODVjr, to extend the whole network lifetime by eliminating the unnecessary RREQ overhead of low-energy nodes. In EG-AODVjr, nodes are classified into four grades according to its remaining energy and adopt different RREQ processing mechanisms separately due to its grade to prevent low-energy nodes from wasting energy on forwarding RREQ packets. Furthermore, we modify the path selected scheme by putting forward a new method to calculate the path cost. EG-AODVjr is simulated and the results show that it can prolong the network lifetime by 26.1% compared with that of original AODVjr, achieving a better performance on extending Zigbee network lifetime.