On the Use of Nodes with Controllable Mobility for Conserving Power in MANETs

We explore the idea of using relay nodes with controllable mobility as intermediate hops for reducing the power consumption in a mobile ad hoc network (MANET). We formulate the relay positioning problem and propose four variations of a simple algorithm to compute the optimal position and the movement of the relay nodes. Results from a preliminary simulation study indicate that deployment of relay nodes does result in considerable power savings in MANETs.