Investigating Power Aware AODV for Efficient Power Routing in MANETs

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a wireless network set up "on the fly" without the need of any network infrastructure to be present. As such, the mobiles nodes in a MANET have to double up as intermediate nodes for data routing. These additional transmissions will further drain the power resources of mobile nodes which are anyway likely to be running on limited battery power. This paper proposes and investigates a Power-Aware Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector routing protocol (PAW-AODV) for efficient power routing. PAW-AODV could use the limited power resources efficiently as it routes based on a power-based cost function. Both AODV and PAW-AODV are simulated in various mobile situations using QUALNET. They are also subjected to the various hop count limits that the data could traverse from source to destination. Their performances in the various scenarios are then compared to reflect the relative merits of each protocol.