A multipath energy-conserving routing protocol for wireless ad hoc networks lifetime improvement

International audienceAd hoc networks are wireless mobile networks that can operate without infrastructure and without centralized networkmanagement. Traditional techniques of routing are not well adapted. Indeed, their lack of reactivity with respect to thevariability of network changes makes them difficult to use. Moreover, conserving energy is a critical concern in the design ofrouting protocols for ad hoc networks, because most mobile nodes operate with limited battery capacity, and the energydepletion of a node affects not only the node itself but also the overall network lifetime. In all proposed single-path routingschemes a new path-discovery process is required once a path failure is detected, and this process causes delay and wastage ofnode resources. A multipath routing scheme is an alternative to maximize the network lifetime. In this paper, we propose anenergy-efficient multipath routing protocol, called AOMR-LM (Ad hoc On-demand Multipath Routing with LifetimeMaximization), which preserves the residual energy of nodes and balances the consumed energy to increase the networklifetime. To achieve this goal, we used the residual energy of nodes for calculating the node energy level. The multipathselection mechanism uses this energy level to classify the paths. Two parameters are analyzed: the energy threshold beta and thecoefficient alpha. These parameters are required to classify the nodes and to ensure the preservation of node energy. Our protocolimproves the performance of mobile ad hoc networks by prolonging the lifetime of the network. This novel protocol has beencompared with other protocols: AOMDV and ZD-AOMDV. The protocol performance has been evaluated in terms of networklifetime, energy consumption, and end-to-end delay