A multipath energy-conserving routing protocol for wireless ad hoc networks lifetime improvement

Ad hoc networks are wireless mobile networks that can operate without infrastructure and without centralized network management. Traditional techniques of routing are not well adapted. Indeed, their lack of reactivity with respect to the variability of network changes makes them difficult to use. Moreover, conserving energy is a critical concern in the design of routing protocols for ad hoc networks because most mobile nodes operate with limited battery capacity, and the energy depletion of a node affects not only the node itself but also the overall network lifetime. In all proposed single-path routing schemes, a new path-discovery process is required once a path failure is detected, and this process causes delay and wastage of node resources. A multipath routing scheme is an alternative to maximize the network lifetime. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient multipath routing protocol, called ad hoc on-demand multipath routing with lifetime maximization (AOMR-LM), which preserves the residual energy of nodes and balances the consumed energy to increase the network lifetime. To achieve this goal, we used the residual energy of nodes for calculating the node energy level. The multipath selection mechanism uses this energy level to classify the paths. Two parameters are analyzed: the energy threshold β and the coefficient α. These parameters are required to classify the nodes and to ensure the preservation of node energy. Our protocol improves the performance of mobile ad hoc networks by prolonging the lifetime of the network. This novel protocol has been compared with other protocols: ad hoc on-demand multipath distance vector (AOMDV) and ZD-AOMDV. The protocol performance has been evaluated in terms of network lifetime, energy consumption, and end-to-end delay.