Energy efficient cross-layer design in MANETs

Wireless nodes in MANET present stringent resource constraints such as limited battery power and storage capacity, so energy aware cross-layer design is essential to improve the battery life. For prolonged network operational time, energy conservation is a critical issue in routing protocol design in ad-hoc wireless networks. Regardless of the energy saving issues, the conventional AODV routing protocol uses smallest hop count as the main metric to calculate the best path for routing the data packets to its destination. Major source of energy cost in a routing protocol is the energy used to transmit the data packets. For this purpose, we consider the problem of adjusting the transmission power of the nodes to an optimal power level and incorporate low power consumption strategies into the routing protocol through upward information flow cross-layer model between MAC Layer and Network Layer. Using QualNet 5.2 as the simulation tool, we evaluate the performance of our proposed energy efficient cross-layer design to AODV, which is named as Cross Layer Energy Efficient AODV (CLEE-AODV). We investigate by implementing the required changes in the route discovery process using cross-layer approach in the AODV. Simulation results show our proposed cross-layer routing protocol offers performance enhancement as compared to AODV in terms of total transmission power, energy efficiency, energy consumption per node, and throughput.