Power and Delay-aware Multi-Path Routing Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) also called mesh networks, consist of a large number of mobile nodes that communicate with each other in the absence of any fixed infrastructure or centralized administration. The principle characteristics of MANET are the dynamic topology and the limited battery power of mobile nodes. The discharge of the battery causes many problems such as the loss of the packets and the re-initialization of route discovery which leads to lot of bandwidth consumption, increase in the delay and decrease in the throughput. In this paper, we propose a new power and delay aware routing protocol for wireless Ad Hoc networks. The goal of our proposed routing protocol is not only to find more stable paths from a source to a destination node in terms of remaining life time of battery, but also to find multi-paths that satisfy Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, given in terms of delay and bandwidth. To evaluate our proposed routing protocol (PDMRP), an extensive simulation study is performed using the NS-2 simulator. We show through simulation that our proposed routing protocol called Power and Delay aware Multi-path Routing Protocol (PDMRP) outperforms the Stable Path Routing Protocol based on Power Awareness (SPR) and the Modified Adhoc On-Demand Distance Vector (MAODV) routing protocols in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay, and loss rate. We modify the AODV protocol in NS-2 simulator so that it supports the energy module. We add the energy class to the relay and destination nodes. Therefore, the life time of each node in this protocol decreases when it sends or receives a packet. This modification is made on the AODV protocol to become similar to the two other routing protocols (The three protocols support the energy module).