Multipath minimum energy routing in ad hoc network

In ad hoc networks, energy conservation is a very important design issue. Several energy-efficient routing protocols try to address this issue. In this paper, we propose a multipath minimum energy routing mechanism to minimize the overall energy consumption of the network. We model an ad hoc network by a set of nodes and links. Each link is associated with an energy cost function which is a function of the total traffic flowing over this link. We focus on the problem of how to split traffic among multiple paths to minimize the sum of the links´ energy cost. We present a primal formulation of the problem and introduce a methodology for solving it. The proposed approach can get optimal traffic allocation and can be easily implemented in a distributed manner. We evaluate its performance by comparing it to some existing energy-efficient routing protocols via simulation. Satisfyingly, our proposal achieves more residual energy and balanced energy consumption.