Cross-layer Approach for Energy Efficient Routing in WANETs

A wireless ad hoc network (WANET) is a collection of wireless terminals that communicate with each other without predetermined topology. Since WANET devices are power-limited, network protocols should be designed to prolong the battery lifetime of these devices. In this paper, we propose a cross-layer integration approach for power efficient routing protocol. The proposed cross-layer integration between power control in link layer and routing protocol in network layer aims to maximize the network lifetime. We implement our proposed protocol as an extension to AODV routing protocol. We evaluated the proposed protocol by comprehensively simulating a set of random WANET environments. We simulated six different metrics comparing our proposed protocol with AODV protocol. The results showed that the proposed protocol maximizes the network lifetime, reduces the end-to-end delay and saves the total energy consumption while achieving the throughput requirement.