Energy-aware routing in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

The next generation communication systems will provide high quality multimedia services in a flexible and efficient manner. As an extension of next generation networks, Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) have attracted significant attention amongst researchers. Nodes in a MANET have limited battery power. Hence, ad hoc routing protocols ought to be energy conservative to support real-time multimedia services. In this paper, we propose a proactive routing protocol which gives better performance and satisfies the basic power aware parameters like minimum energy consumption per packet, maximum network lifetime, and minimum variance in the node power levels. We use breadth first search to gather the network topology.. From this global information, a least cost path is generated using Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm. This least cost path has better battery resources and is refreshed after some fixed intervals of data packet delivery to keep the variance in residual battery power to minimum. Our simulation results show that the proposed protocol provides good service to different types of media while conserving energy.