IEEE 802.11 fragmentation-aware energy-efficient ad-hoc routing protocols

We define techniques to compute energy-efficient paths, using the IEEE 802.11 fragmentation mechanism, within the framework of on-demand routing protocols. We focus on one specific on-demand routing protocol, namely the ad-hoc on-demand vector routing protocol (AODV), and show how it should be adapted to compute energy-efficient paths. The choice of energy-efficient paths depends on link error rates on different wireless links, which in turn depend on channel noise. We show how our scheme accounts for such channel characteristics in computing such paths and how it exploits the IEEE 802.11 fragmentation mechanism to generate optimum energy-efficient paths. We perform a detailed study of the AODV protocol and our energy-efficient variants, under various noise and node mobility conditions. Our results show that our proposed variants of on-demand routing protocols can achieve orders of magnitude improvement in energy-efficiency of reliable data paths.