An Energy-Aware Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks Based on Route Energy Comprehensive Index

The design of energy-aware routing protocols has always been an important issue for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), because reducing the network energy consumption and increasing the network lifetime are the two main objectives for MANETs. Hence, this paper proposes an energy-aware routing protocol that simultaneously meets above two objectives. It first presents Route Energy Comprehensive Index (RECI) as the new routing metric, then chooses the path with both minimum hops and maximum RECI value as the route in route discovery phase, and finally takes some measures to protect the source nodes and the sink nodes from being overused when their energies are low so as to prolong the life of the corresponding data flow. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol can significantly reduce the energy consumption and extend the network lifetime while improve the average end-to-end delay compared with other protocols.