Energy Efficient Co-operative Routing Mechanism for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Abstract

Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs) have become essential in various civilian and military applications. The mobility of the nodes is exploited to obtain required information in difficult and hostile terrain. The effectiveness of the collected information can also be increased by setting up communication between the mobile nodes. Since, these nodes depend upon limited power supply/battery backup, it is imperative that, energy conservation in the nodes should be given primal importance.
Due to the mobility of MANET nodes and limited energy supply, reactive routing protocols, which establish routes on-demand are preferred over proactive routing protocols, which continuously update routing information as soon as some changes occur in the network. Recently [1], Quality of Service (QoS) mechanism was built over reactive routing protocols. However, many MANET applications collect large volumes of data, which needs to be transmitted through the network by using these reactive routing protocols. Routing such large volumes of data can easily drain out the energy reserves in MANET nodes. It is essential that, QoS mechanism for MANET should be made highly energy efficient.
In this work, the QoS mechanism proposed in [1] is extended to achieve better energy efficiency. Co-operative Communication mechanism is introduced to achieve this goal. This mechanism utilizes the suitable neighbor nodes around the routing path to share the routing load, and achieve energy conservation. The proposed mechanism is implemented in Network Simulator 3. Empirical results demonstrate the excellent energy efficiency achieved by the proposed mechanism over the QoS mechanism described in [1].