On-Demand Maximum Battery Life Routing with Power Sensitive Power Control in Ad Hoc Networks

For on-demand power-aware routing in wireless multi-hop networks, no efficient mechanism is currently available to avoid the overhead involved in frequently learning the available battery power at the nodes and then choosing the route that maximizes node lifetimes. In [12], we presented a localized, variable transmission range power control strategy called power sensitive power control (PCON) to simultaneously increase the network lifetime (time of first node failure) and reduce the end-to-end delay. Here, we show that PCON when used with poweraware routing algorithms like Min-Max Battery Cost Routing (MMBCR) [15], can divert routes from heavily used nodes to lightly used nodes in a timely, on-demand fashion and maximize network lifetime, minimize delay per packet compared to on-demand MMBCR operated at the minimum common transmission power with periodic route refreshing. We support our claim with extensive simulations conducted by implementing MMBCR and PCON on top of DSR [9] in ns-2 [4].