On the Suitability of Using the Residual Lifetime as a Routing Metric in MANETs

Under determined circumstances, route discovery procedures may become responsible for the consumption of the scarce resources of ad hoc network: wireless bandwidth and battery power. As these procedures are triggered when the currently employed routes break, the network efficiency could be easily incremented by the judicious selection of the route to employ among the paths that the routing protocol discovers. With this purpose, in this paper we evaluate a new route metric which helps for the characterization of routes. This route metric is based on the statistical estimation of the path residual lifetime so those paths that are expected to endure longer are preferred. The simulation results show that significant improvements can be obtained when this metric is conveniently used. However, the suitability of this metric mainly depends on the route length.