Simulated Comparison of Power-Aware Routing Protocols in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

An infrastructure-less wireless network, or mobile ad hoc network (MANET), is one in which the topology is dynamically established in the absence of a central authority like a router, access point, etc. Due to the short battery life of its mobile nodes, which are powered by batteries, a node`s active state is shortened by unplanned shutdowns or restarts. A difficult task in MANETs is extending the battery life of each node. This is achieved by creating and implementing a power-aware routing protocol that considers power optimization techniques—a method that is rarely used with native routing protocols. The reactive routing protocol MMBCR and the proactive routing protocol MBCR are two native routing protocols that are available in MANETs. In this work, their respective performances are evaluated. To demonstrate how using a power-aware routing protocol might improve MANET operating performance, an evaluation is carried out by contrasting these two protocols with a well-known power-aware routing protocol that is available for MANET MTPR. For assessing performance, four widely-used routing metrics are employed: the total number of missed packets, the end-to-end packet delivery ratio, the end-to-end delay, and the network lifetime. The simulation findings, conducted for all situations examined using the ns -2 simulator, verify that MTPR performs better than other protocols, MBCR performs mediocrely, and MMBCR almost performs worse than other protocols.