A Novel device and application-aWare Energy efficient Routing Algorithm for WLANs

The latest mobile devices such as smart phones and tablet PCs, equipped with high resolution interactive screens, highly advanced CPUs, wireless networking and multimedia processing capabilities have become very important in people´s daily life. The growth of these devices´ popularity has determined an increased interest from shopping malls, theme parks, institutions, convention centre, etc. to deploy wireless network infrastructure and offer diverse online services addressed to such device users. However infrastructure deployment is expensive and highly localized, so accessing content from mobile devices supported by ad-hoc wireless connectivity is considered a very good alternative solution. In such scenarios, energy efficiency has always been a key issue and highly important especially for wireless routing algorithm design as the mobile wireless devices are powered by batteries with limited power capacity. Moreover different applications, e.g. online games, online chat, video streaming, etc. put different loads on different hardware components (e.g. CPU, wireless card, screen) and result in different energy constraints. In this context, we propose a novel Application-aWare Energy efficient Routing Algorithm (AWERA) for heterogeneous wireless networks which performs energy-aware routing based on application-related characteristics and nodes´ energy budget. AWERA predicts nodes´ energy depletion according to the application type they run, network load and remaining battery energy level, in order to assist a novel cross layer energy efficient routing solution. Simulation results show how our solution has better performance and energy efficiency when compared with other wireless routing protocols.