Power-aware route maintenance protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

Most power-aware routing protocols proposed for mobile ad hoc networks are "proactive" protocols where power consumption state of nodes are exchanged periodically among nodes. For on-demand reactive routing protocols, however, new routes have to be acquired periodically to better reflect the current power states of nodes. We propose a power-aware route maintenance protocol in order to prolong the network lifetime, when applied to on-demand reactive routing protocols without periodic route recovery. This is achieved by using two threshold power levels to evenly distribute power dissipation among nodes. Through simulations, we proved that our protocol can be applied to on-demand routing protocols without the need to perform periodic route recovery.