Energy-Efficient MANET Routing: Ideal vs. Realistic Performance

Nodes in a mobile ad hoc network are typically battery-powered. Energy consumption is therefore an important metric to consider in designing routing protocols for such networks. In this paper, we present some results from our work on integrating energy-efficiency aspects into a standard MANET routing protocol, OLSR. In particular, we are exploring the impact of nodes having only inaccurate/imprecise knowledge of the energy levels of other nodes. We use two different energy-efficient variants of the OLSR protocol and simulate a wide range of scenarios. Our results show that for all mobility scenarios, traffic loads, and protocol variations, the achievable protocol performance is negatively affected by the imprecise information available. The loss in performance can be as high as 10%, emphasizing the need to collect more precise routing-related information.