Energy Efficient Load Balancing Approach for Multipath Routing Protocol in Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is a group of mobile nodes that are capable of forming a network without the need of any administrator. Nodes in such a network are battery operated and are self organized and maintained. Energy consumption is considered as a major challenging task in MANETs. In general nodes choose shortest path to transmit the packets. Using single path to transmit packets might lead to congestion, energy depletion and network failure. Instead, identifying multiple paths and transmitting packets through available multiple paths ensure reliable communication, efficient load balancing and reduces energy consumption. An Energy Efficient Load Balancing approach for multipath AOMDV protocol (EELB-AOMDV) is proposed in this paper. NS 2.35 simulator is used and the results are compared with latest multipath routing protocols. Results show that, EELB-AOMDV achieves an improvement of upto 33%, 48% and 34% in packet delivery ratio and upto 78%, 84% and 80% in end to end delay compared to FF-AOMDV, AOMDV and AOMR-LM protocols respectively. In addition, simulation is carried out with standard AOMDV protocol and the results are compared with EELB-AOMDV protocol. Results show that the protocol outperforms standard AOMDV with an improvement of 11.11% in packet delivery ratio. End to end delay, energy consumption and routing overhead are decreased upto 63.35%, 43.95% and 3.66% respectively compared to standard AOMDV protocol.