Energy aware reliable routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

Energy is a critical and challenging issue for battery-constrained devices, especially for mobile ad hoc stations, which are responsible for relaying data packets for neighbor nodes. Therefore, considerable research has been devoted to the research of energy consumption efficiency. Care has been taken not only to reduce the overall energy consumption but also to balance individual battery usage, since unbalanced energy consumption will result in earlier node failure for overloaded nodes, and then lead to network partition and reduced network lifetime. This paper presents a novel on demand routing algorithm named Energy Aware Reliable Routing (EARR) to avoid the over usage of hot spots, reduce the route-reconstructions due to residual energy shortages, and finally prolong network lifetime. In the method, only nodes with sufficient residual energy to complete the task will take part in the propagation of route request (RREQ), therefore only valid path has the potential to transmit data. Simulation results verified that EARR can improve the network performance in terms of average route discovery time, normalized routing load, as well distribution of energy consumption. Besides, it is more robust to energy estimation error than existing methods.