Energy Aware Power Save Mode based AODV Routing for IEEE 802.11s Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Owing to the self organizing, self configuring and self healing capabilities, Wireless Mesh Nwetworks (WMN) have emerged as most powerful architectures in recent times. Wireless Mesh Networks operate with limited battery resources. In 802.11s, a mobile station(STA) can act as router as well as client that results in increased energy consumption during routing process. The degradation of energy at STA can result in low network performance due to relay STA failure. In order to increase network performance there is a need to reduce the energy consumption rate of STA. To save energy, 802.11s has introduced a mechanism called power save mode(PSM) which switches STA mode from active to light sleep or deep sleep mode when STA is not involved in transmission. This ensures saving of energy at each STA during routing process. Several models have been proposed by researchers to improve the energy saving mechanisms in 802.11s. Adhoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing algorithm is used for routing purpose in WMN. In this routing protocol, regular usage of the same node during routing may lead to battery failure and result in low network lifetime. Hence in this work we propose a novel Energy Aware Power Save Mode-AODV (EAPSM-AODV) routing model that switches among power save modes based on battery status of a node before participating in AODV routing. Our proposed routing model refers to the mechanism that takes available remaining energy and energy draining rate of a node into account to decide on relaying traffic. It consist of four units namely Routing, Path choosing, Mode selector and Energy units. Experiments have been conducted using NS3 simulator by considering various situations such as keeping nodes in static position and moving nodes dynamically in a simulation area. The results shows that our proposed model significantly improves network performance and increase in network lifetime.