An Energy-Aware Routing Mechanism for Mobile Ad Hoc

Most of the mobile ad hoc networks applications rely on battery-powered nodes. Thus, energy constraints are very important in this kind of network. This paper presents an energy-aware routing mechanism to balance the energy consumption among the nodes of the network. The mechanism was evaluated over the AODV protocol using a realistic energy consumption model. The energy model takes into account the way the packet is trans-mitted and the role-played by the node on its transmission. The results show that the packet length impacts the energy efficiency of the network and that the proposed mechanism increases the network lifetime from 13 % for large packets to 19 % for small packets, compared with the standard AODV protocol. Key-words: Mobile ad hoc networks, energy management, network lifetime.