Adaptive Path Energy Conserving Routing in MANETs

The specific features of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) impose new requirements for routing protocols. The aim of this paper is to present an approach that enhances routing performance by integrating ad hoc related characteristics. We propose a loop-free adaptive path energy conserving scheme which attempts to minimize both routing and storage overhead in order to efficiently provide robustness to host mobility, adaptability to wireless channel fluctuations and optimization of network resources use in large-scale networks. The strength of our scheme, based on source routing approach, named Energy Conserving Dynamic Source Routing (EC-DSR), is to handle network state related constraints such as node’s energy consumption, links’ availability and paths’ quality. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated via simulation and is compared to DSR protocol. Better results are obtained with EC-DSR in terms of control overhead. Furthermore, EC-DSR shows significant improvements in delay and forwarding efficiency for large scalable networks.