PAST-EnDRoP: Position aided STDMA MAC protocol with Energy and Delay Constrained Routing for MANET

Energy conservation is a critical issue regarding wireless mobile ad hoc networks, since the nodes are battery restrained and the depletion of their power defines the lifetime of the network. This paper presents the PAST-EnDRoP: Position Aided Spatial TDMA (PA-STDMA) MAC protocol with Energy and Delay Constrained Routing for mobile ad hoc networks. It is a novel approach designed for optimized channel use and improved power consumption efficiency. PA-STDMA performs transmission scheduling based on positional information of individual nodes. This facilitates on-line topology transparent transmission scheduling and scalability. For optimized bandwidth use, the protocol integrates transmission scheduling with contention. PA-STDMA provides power efficient operation as a result of its efficient channel arbitration and intelligent use of low power mode. EnDRop is another mechanism for energy saving and timely delivery of data packets is incorporated into the route discovery phase to select paths with lower cost. The proposed algorithm utilizes two metrics: residual energy and queue length at each node. Buffer information is considered as a traffic load characteristic and its use is two fold: limitation of battery power consumption and end-to-end delay. To evaluate the performance of the protocol PA-STDMA MAC and EnDRoP is simulated in GloMoSim. The results of the simulations are compared to results obtained from simulations of the IEEE 802.11 MAC under the same conditions. The comparison suggests that PA-STDMA MAC provides improved medium access control efficiency and optimized power consumption. This is indicated by reduced communication overhead, improved network congestion and increased network lifetime. EnDRoP provides a modified energy and delay-constrained version demonstrates that the latter one improves system performance for certain network scenarios.