An Energy-Efficient Congestion-Aware Routing Protocol for Heterogeneous Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Congestion with limited resources occurs in heterogeneous mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Packet transmissions suffer from interference and fading because of the shared wireless channel and dynamic topology. In heterogeneous ad hoc networks, throughput via a given route depends upon the minimum data rate of its entire links. In a route of links with various data rates, there is a chance of congestion if a high data rate node passes more traffic to a low data rate node and this leads to long queuing delays in such routes. The conventional hop count routing metric does not adapt well to mobile nodes. The transmission capability, reliability and congestion around a link are included in a congestion-aware routing metric for MANETs. In this paper, based on the data rate, queuing delay, link quality, residual energy and MAC overhead, we propose to develop an energy efficient congestion aware routing protocol which uses a combined weight values as a routing metric. Based on the node weight of all the in-network nodes, the route with minimum cost index is selected among the discovered routes. Simulation results prove that by reducing the energy consumption, packet drop and delay our proposed routing protocol achieves high throughput and packet delivery ratio.