Energy efficient Enhanced-AODV protocol for Multi-Rover systems

In recent years, on-demand routing protocols have attained more attention in MANETs due to their abilities and efficiency as they are able to organize themselves dynamically with lower memory overhead at lower bandwidth requirement than table driven protocols (proactive protocols). MANETs (Mobile Ad hoc Networks) have limited bandwidth and hence it is important to reduce the number of routing packets exchanged to maintain the routing state information. The conventional broadcast scheme that broadcast packets omni directionally suffers from several drawbacks like excessive amount of redundant traffic, exaggerated interference or contention on among neighboring nodes and limited coverage. The prevalent well known AODV and DSDV protocols used for routing in such networks use the conventional broadcast scheme and thus suffer from these drawbacks as well. Extensive research has been made in this front and various routing algorithms have been proposed for conserving network resources specially energy consumption due to transmission of data. In this paper, the problem in MANETs is addressed by proposing a new protocol called Enhanced-AODV (E-AODV) protocol. It is alleviated that the above mentioned broadcast storm problem in adhoc networks with the use of directional antennas. Compared to the omni directional scheme E-AODV uses minimum number of control packets and with lower broadcast redundancy E-AODV is more bandwidth and energy efficient.