Energy-aware metrics impact on Multipath DSR in MANETs environment

In this paper an innovative energy aware routing protocol for wireless ad hoc network is proposed. Different routing metrics have been considered and a full analysis of their performance have been led out; the minimum drain rate metric has been selected as energy metric to integrate in the multipath dynamic source routing (DSR) protocol. Comparison of multipath DSR with MDR, cache update and round robin scheduling (MEA-DSR) has been also compared with multipath DSR with MDR metric without cache update mechanism (MDSR-MDR). The benefits of the multiple route selection have been illustrated by a performance comparison with an energy efficient DSR (DSR-MDR). An update mechanism and a simple data packet scheduling among the energy efficient paths have also been implemented to update the source route cache and for improving the traffic and energy load balancing. Many simulation campaigns have been carried out, confirming the improvements obtained in the unipath routing by the introduction of the energy aware metric.