A Leader Replacement Protocol Based on Early Discovery of Battery Power Failure in MANETs

In cooperative Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs), copies of data are replicated on different mobile devices to increase resource accessibility and data availability. In order to preserve data consistency, a leader or authoritative control node is assigned to act as an organizer for the shared data copies. Since mobile devices have limited battery power, the leader may fail at any time. When the leader fails, another leader has to be elected to maintain data availability and consistency. Current leader election approaches in MANETs employ a notable wireless communication overhead to replace the leader. These wireless communications consume about 70% of total battery power. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to replace exhausted leader in MANETs based on the measurement of its remaining battery power early before it dies. More specifically, the proposed approach replaces the exhausted leader with a healthy one when its remaining battery power reaches a predefined threshold. Our approach has two contributions: 1) early precaution of leader power failure, 2) reducing power consumption used in leader replacement by reducing communication overhead.