Energy Efficient On-Demand Multipath Routing Protocol for Multi-Hop Ad Hoc Networks

Energy consumption is a crucial design concern in wireless ad hoc networks since wireless nodes are typically battery-limited. Multipath routing schemes could exploit multiple disjoint routes between any pair of source and destination node, in order to provide aggregated bandwidth, fault-tolerance and load-balancing properties. A multipath routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks is proposed, called MMRE-AOMDV, which extends the Ad Hoc On-demand Multipath Distance Vector (AOMDV) routing protocol. The key idea of the protocol is to find the minimal nodal residual energy of each route in the process of selecting path and sort multi-route by descending nodal residual energy. Once a new route with greater nodal residual energy is emerging, it is reselected to forward rest data packets. It can balance individual node's battery power utilization and hence prolong the entire network's lifetime. Simulation results show that the proposed MMRE-AOMDV routing protocol performed better than AOMDV.