Stability-Energy Consumption Tradeoff among Mobile Ad Hoc Network Routing Protocols

We present an ns-2 simulation based analysis on the energy consumption of the stability-oriented on- demand mobile ad hoc network (MANET) routing protocols. The stability-oriented routing protocols studied include Associativity Based Routing (ABR) [16], Flow-oriented Routing Protocol (FORP) [15] and Route-lifetime Assessment Based Routing (RABR) [1] protocol. Our simulation results show that FORP routes are more stable than RABR routes, which are more stable than ABR routes. On the other hand, based on the energy consumed per packet and the average energy used per node, ABR is better than RABR, which is better than FORP. Thus, we see a stability-energy consumption tradeoff within the class of stability- oriented routing protocols. Regarding the fairness of node usage, we observe that there is an appreciable variation in the energy consumption per node as only the chain of nodes that form stable routes are exhausted to a greater extent.