Modified DSR, an energy conserving approach to DSR protocol in MANET

MANET is a type of infrastructure less wireless communication network/system that can be set up at anytime, anywhere. In MANET each and every process consumes power. Power consumption is one of the most crucial design concerns in Mobile Ad-hoc networks as the nodes in MANET are battery limited. To increase the life time of nodes as well as network energy management is necessary. The life time of a node can be increased when less power is consumed by the nodes during active as well as during inactive communication. In order to increase the life time of a node, traffic should be routed in a way that, power consumption is minimized. DSR is a routing protocol used in MANET. It uses two mechanisms in routing Route Discovery and Route Maintenance. During route discovery it selects the path to establish communication between source and destination. The flooding of routes creates overhead in routing traffic which cause extra consumption of energy. In this paper anew route discovery mechanism is proposed to conserve the energy of nodes during route discovery and data transmission phase compare to original DSR protocol. The proposed work is verified using NS-2 simulator.