Energy Aware On Demand Routing for MANETs

The dynamic topology of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and limited battery capacity of mobile nodes entail routing schemes to consider these factors in the route discovery and maintenance. On demand protocols like AODV initially choose an optimum path but initiate a route rediscovery with the first link failure. The variants of these protocols strive to overcome the limitations of high route discovery latency and frequent route discovery overhead in the event of failures by routing on multiple paths. These schemes ameliorate the routing to some extent but result in high control overheads which is not desirable in the energy constrained environment. The present work focuses on choosing a stable path based on energy status and distance to avoid frequent route rediscovery. Local repair is done in the event of a node deletion to further extend the lifetime of a route. The scheme has been incorporated in AODV to determine the efficacy of the technique. Extensive simulation has been done to evaluate the performance of the scheme which is compared with the basic AODV and DSR protocols. Simulation results show that the scheme outperforms AODV and DSR for dense network scenarios in terms of packet delivery and end to end delay.