Overhead reduction and energy management in DSR for MANETs

Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) Protocol is a commonly applied reactive protocol for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). When the network size is increased, overhead is increased due to the source routing nature of DSR. Moreover, energy consumption of the nodes increases, as the nodes act as intermediate nodes for many source destination pairs. In order to improve the scalability of DSR, in this paper, a modification is proposed, and is referred to as Modified DSR (MDSR). Secondly, in order to conserve the battery power, MDSR with energy management is proposed, in which the packets are transmitted with minimum required energy. Simulation results show that both MDSR and MDSR with Energy management generate less overhead and delay compared to standard DSR. It is observed that in MDSR with Energy management, irrespective of network size, the average energy consumption per node is 37.9% less compared to that of standard DSR.