Design and implementation of an energy efficient routing approach based on existing AODV protocol in Mobile Adhoc Networks for military

The deployment of Mobile Adhoc Networks (MANETs) in military/battlefield environment has helped proliferation of wireless voice and data communications services to the users beyond the reach of fixed network connectivity. However, the battery operated mobile nodes are constrained by their battery life, which may be difficult to replace/recharge in hostile battlefield environment, and thus affecting the network lifetime of such a network. Due to the critical operational requirement of such networks, the outage of even a few of the nodes due to power exhaustion might cause disconnect of services in the entire network. The proposed approach aims at increasing the network lifetime of such a MANET, by distributing the routing load among all the nodes within the network. This is achieved by calculating the residual energy of all the nodes in the entire path between the source and the destination, for various paths available, and then comparing and selecting the path which is most optimal in terms of energy efficiency. This approach follows a load balancing approach that avoids power/traffic congested paths and chooses paths that are lightly loaded. This helps in reducing the variance in energy consumption at various nodes due to load distribution and thus eventually increasing the overall network lifetime of the network.