Routing in wireless ad hoc networks jointly optimized for minimum transmission power and maximum network lifetime

Wireless ad hoc networks are being deployed in a wide range of applications and many of these networks use battery operated nodes. A key requirement for these networks is to maximize the time span when all nodes have sufficient battery charge to participate in communication with other nodes. To meet this requirement, this paper describes a routing strategy that seeks to find the best balance between minimizing the power consumption and evenly using all nodes within the network to avoid early exhaustion of individual nodes. The proposed scheme is compared to reported schemes using minimum power routing and the results show that the proposed scheme gives a longer time until the first node´s battery energy is depleted with a lower network power consumption than schemes using just energy minimization.