A load balanced aware routing protocol for wireless ad hoc networks

Nodes in ad hoc networks can be unfairly burdened to support many packet-relaying functions, resulting in excessive loads on these hot spots. This load on nodes appears in two major aspects: traffic and power consumption. Unbalanced traffic may lead to more delay, packet dropping, and decreasing packet delivery ratio (PDR). Unbalanced energy consumption leads to node failure, network partitioning and decreases network lifetime and route reliability. Existing approaches try to improve the performance of routing protocols with respect to traffic balancing or energy consumption balancing, but most lead to drawbacks such as more delay, blocking, or dependence on global information from all nodes. In this paper we improve the well known dynamic source routing (DSR) protocol to the so called load balanced DSR (LBDSR) protocol. We modify the RREQ (route request) and RREP (route reply) messages in DSR in order to maintain the remaining energy of intermediate nodes which forward RREQ and RREP. Route structure, available in the nodes cache, is modified so that the remaining energy of nodes can be calculated. LBDSR shows better traffic balancing and energy consumption balancing, end-to-end delay and route reliability metrics than DSR. Furthermore, LBDSR can also be customized to achieve better performance with respect to each of these metrics instead of being a trade-off between them.