A method for providing energy efficient neighborhood maintenance in MANETs

Abstract

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) are widely employed in many wireless networks, e.g. tactical area networks, due to its several advantages. Most of the MANETs must meet certain quality of service requirements such as high link reliability, low energy consumption and high throughput. However, major issues like interference dramatically degrade the service quality. In order to provide a high quality of service, an efficient control protocol, which handles the interference problem in neighborhood maintenance while providing the energy efficiency is required. Although there are many neighbor discovery and maintenance protocols for MANETs, there is a need for distributed schedule-based control communication protocols avoiding the interference problem at the same time supporting the mobility and low power consumption. To that end, we introduce an energy efficient control communication protocol which concerns neighbor discovery as well as neighborhood maintenance and solves the interference problems at the same time supporting mobility. Our proposed protocol uses increased communication transmission power levels in certain intervals. To evaluate our protocol, we conduct a set of experiments with highly dense and mobile networks. Simulation results show that our protocol provides high link reliabilities and energy efficiency while providing high throughputs.