A High Performance and Longer Lasting Network Lifetime Routing Protocol for MANETs

Mobile ad hoc networks based on mobile devices can serve as a very convenient communication means for applications in various areas such as disaster recovery, rescue, healthcare, and military. The popularity of these networks has attracted a lot of works both in academia and industry. Due to the dynamic characteristics of mobile nodes, advancing the network performance is always a critical issue and it is still open. Another important issue is power consumption because most mobile devices operate on batteries. The performance and power consumption of a mobile ad hoc network are dependent on the routing protocol employed. Therefore, to address the above two issues one must design a sufficient routing protocol. In general, different performance metrics may be evolved in a routing protocol design. However, for the intended purpose, we should optimize some reasonable metrics in addition to others. Hence, in this paper, we propose a high performance and longer lasting network lifetime routing protocol, which utilizes the remaining battery capacity and hops number as the routing metrics for route selection. The experimental results based on network simulation (NS2) show that our proposed protocol significantly improves the network performance as well as prolongs the network lifetime.