An Energy-Aware Random Multi-path Routing Protocol for MANETs

Because of the success of wired network, the protocols proposed for MANETs in the past are based on shortest path algorithm such as AODV or DSR. Although it brings better data transmission bauds, various conditions of MANETs might cause different problems. For example, MANETs usually run in limited power supply. Therefore, if they communicate using shortest path algorithm, then power consumption will centralize on specific nodes and cause network disconnected in an earlier stage. To stabilize MANETs, recent researches consider two major measures: one is to minimize total energy consumption and the other is to maximize network lifetime. Consequently, the protocols proposed in recent years almost focus on enhancing power efficiency or balancing power consumption. Nevertheless, it is not enough that we only adopt one method to solve other problems on communication. For instance, the topology of MANETs could change rapidly and we would take much superfluous cost for reconstructing the link. In this paper, we propose an energy-aware random multi-path routing protocol (ERMP) for improving AODV protocol. We propose four communication parts to increase the performance of MANETs, namely, "Avoid Using Low Battery Nodes", "Route with Multi-Path", "Detect the Quality of Links" and "Distribute Power Consumption". According to the experimental results, ERMP presents better performance on network lifetime, standard deviation of residual power and average end-to-end delay by comparing with AODV.