A power consumption study of DSR and OLSR

Low power consumption is important for static sensor nodes and handheld nodes where no power source other than a battery is available. This paper presents the results of an investigation into the power consumption performance of two contrasting ad hoc routing protocols from the IETF MANET working group, namely the proactive protocol OLSR and the reactive protocol DSR. A model of the communications stack, including the routing protocols and air interface is described. The power consumption performance of the routing protocols is compared across a range of simulated network scenarios. Power consumption scaling trends with increasing network size, density and user traffic are reported and hotspots arising from topological causes and/or characteristics of the routing protocols are identified