Multi-metric Energy Efficient Routing in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Increasing network lifetime by reducing energy consumption across the network is one of the major concerns while designing routing protocols for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks. In this paper, we investigate the main reasons that lead to energy depletion and we introduce appropriate routing metrics in the routing decision scheme to mitigate their effect and increase the network lifetime. For our routing scheme, we take into consideration multiple layer parameters, such as MAC queue utilization, node degree and residual energy. We integrate our multi-metric routing scheme into OLSR, a standard MANET proactive routing protocol. We evaluate via simulations in NS3 the protocol modifications under a range of different static and mobile scenarios. The main observations are that in static and low mobility scenarios our modified routing protocol leads to a significant increase (5%-20%) in network lifetime compared to standard OLSR and slightly better performance in terms of Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR).