Multipath minimum energy routing in ad hoc network

In ad hoc networks, energy conservation is a very important design issue. Several energy-efficient routing protocols try to address this issue. In this paper, we propose a multipath minimum energy routing mechanism to minimize the overall energy consumption of the network. We model an ad hoc network by a set of nodes and links. Each link is associated with an energy cost function which is a function of the total traffic flowing over this link. We focus on the problem of how to split traffic among multiple paths to minimize the sum of the links' energy cost. We present a primal formulation of the problem and introduce a methodology for solving it. The proposed approach can get optimal traffic allocation and can be easily implemented in a distributed manner. We evaluate its performance by comparing it to some existing energy-efficient routing protocols via simulation. Satisfyingly, our proposal achieves more residual energy and balanced energy consumption.