Energy-Efficiency based Analysis of Routing Protocols in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs)

Abstract

mobile MANET (Mobile Ad-hoc Network) is an actively self organizing and self configuring network without the need of any centralized base station. This is a collection of various mobile nodes that is connected through a wireless medium forming rapidly changing topologies in the network. The MANETs are infrastructure less in nature and can be set up anytime, anywhere. In the MANETs, all the nodes are mobile and are battery operated. As because all the nodes in MANETs have limited battery resources and due to node mobility, multi hop routes are used over a changing network environment, so to limit the power consumption, to prolong the network lifetime and to improve the robustness of the system, energy efficient routing protocols are required. The design of efficient routing protocols is a fundamental problem in Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET). Many routing protocols have been proposed in the literature, each one is based on different characteristics and properties in MANETs. Some of these respective protocols have been studied and their performances have been analyzed focusing on aspects like energy consumption, packet delivery fraction, network lifetime etc. In this paper, a performance comparison of the DSR (Dynamic Source Routing), AODV (Ad-Hoc on Demand Distance Vector) and DSDV (Destination Sequenced Distance Vector) routing protocols is evaluated on the basis of energy efficiency metrics by varying number of nodes, number of connections and pause time. Simulations are done using NS-2(version NS- 2.35). It has been verified through extensive simulations, which mostly represents a wide spectrum of network conditions that DSR delivers the better performance and needs smaller energy expenditure as that of algorithms AODV and DSDV but it is observed that DSDV prolongs the network lifetime better than the other two protocols and provides better load balancing capability.