Trading latency for energy in densely deployed wireless ad hoc networks using message ferrying

Wireless mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) have the potential for use in important application environments, such as remote environmental monitoring, where energy resources are limited. Efficient power management is necessary to allow these networks to operate over a long period of time. One of the key factors affecting the design of power management mechanisms is the routing protocol in use within the network. In this paper, we investigate the Message ferrying (MF) routing paradigm as a means to save energy while trading off data delivery delay. In MF, special nodes called ferries move around the deployment area to deliver messages for nodes. While this routing paradigm has been developed mainly to deliver messages in partitioned networks, here we explore its use in a connected MANET. The reliance on the movement of ferries to deliver messages increases the delivery delay if a network is not partitioned. However, delegating message delivery to ferries provides the opportunity for nodes to save energy by aggressively disabling their radios when ferries are far away. To exploit this feature, we present a power management framework, in which nodes switch their power management modes based on knowledge of ferry location. We evaluate the performance of our scheme using ns-2 simulations and compare it with a multihop routing protocol, dynamic source routing (DSR). Our simulation results show that MF achieves energy savings as high as 95% compared to DSR without power management and still delivers more than 98% of messages. In contrast, a power-managed DSR delivers many fewer messages than MF to achieve similar energy savings. In the scenario of heavy traffic load, the power-managed DSR delivers less than 20% of messages. MF also shows robust performance for highly mobile nodes, while the performance of DSR suffers significantly. Thus, delay tolerant applications can use MF rather than a multihop routing protocol to save energy efficiently when both routing approaches are available.