Energy Consumption Analysis of the Stable Path and Minimum Hop Path Routing Strategies for Mobile Ad hoc Networks

Summary The high-level contribution of this paper is in exploring the fundamental contradiction between the routing strategies based on optimum stability and minimum hop count and in setting up a framework to identify the routing strategy that will minimize the overall energy consumption for on-demand routing in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). We show that for a given node mobility, as the network density increases, aiming for a sequence of stable routes (called the stable mobile path) reduces the number of route transitions at the cost of an increased hop count. On the other hand, as the network density increases, aiming for a sequence of minimum hop routes (called the minimum hop mobile path) reduces the hop count per path but results in increased number of route transitions. Through extensive simulations, we further explore and elaborate this tradeoff and analyze its effect on the overall energy consumption of a source-destination session when using a stable mobile path vis-a-vis a minimum hop mobile path for on-demand routing in MANETs. We also show that as the energy consumed per hop is reduced, a stable mobile path brings significantly more energy savings in comparison to that obtained by using a minimum hop mobile path.