Dynamic Packet Balancing Agent in MANETs Based on AOMDV

A MANET comprises a set of mobile devices which are capable of communicating with others. Despite its flexibility and portability, it suffers from energy limitation. If the energy consumption of the nodes in the MANET cannot be balanced efficiently, some nodes will die in an early stage due to the energy depletion, which in turn partitions the whole network and leads to the communication failure. To balance the energy consumption, we propose the dynamic packet balancing agent for MANETs. The agent utilizes the HELLO packets to update energy information along a path, which enables the dynamic update of the energy information of each path, and sends packets via the path with the best energy condition. The agent is further applied to AOMDV, a well-known multipath protocol. Simulation result generated by NS2 (network simulator version 2) shows that our proposal outperforms AOMDV in balancing energy consumption.