An Energy-Balanced Routing Protocol for MANETs

Energy balance problem in mobile Ad Hoc networks (MANETs) is studied and a new energy-balanced routing protocol (EBR) with route selection and route maintenance using remaining energy information of nodes is proposed. In the period of route discovery, nodes with more ample energy are selected. When the nodal energy is lower than some threshold, the node sends warning message to the uplink node. Then the uplink node updates its route or finds a new one to avoid route interruption due to energy exhausting and to decrease route repair. The EBR protocol is compared with the DSR protocol by simulation. The results indicate that the EBR protocol improves the energy utilization efficiency, prolongs lifetime of the network, decreases the number of packages lost during transmission, and increases the network throughput ratio in energy -limited MANETs.