Non-blocking, localized routing algorithm for balanced energy consumption in Ad Hoc networks of mobile Hosts

Abstract

As mobile computing requires more computation as well as communication activities, energy efficiency becomes the most critical issue in the battery operated mobile devices, Specifically, in ad hoc networks where each mode is responsible for forwarding neighbor nodes`` data packets, care has to be taken not only to reduce overall energy consumption of all relevant nodes but also to balance individual battery levels. Unbalanced energy usage will result in earlier node failure in overloaded nodes, and this, in turn, may lead to network partitioning and reduced network lifetime, There have been active research to develop energy-aware routing protocols in mobile ad hoc networks and we introduce one such algorithm, called Global Energy-Aware Routing(GEAR). It uses power-related metric such as minimizing energy consumed per packet and tries to find an optimal route with global information. Even though it can save energy and maximize the system life, GEAR has several disadvantages such as blocking property and route cache problem. This is because GEAR requires global information of all relevant modes in order to compare and choose the best route. This paper presents a new routing algorithm, called Local Energy-Aware Routing(LEAR), which achieves a trade-off between the balanced energy consumption and the shortest routing delay, while avoiding the blocking and route cache problems. Performance study based on GloMoSim simulator shows that LEAR achieves balanced energy consumption across all nodes.