Evaluation of Energy Consumption of Proactive, Reactive, and Hybrid Routing Protocols in Wireless Mesh Networks Using 802.11 Standards

Sidoine D Samo,Jean Louis E K Fendji

doi:10.4236/jcc.2018.64001

Abstract

This paper provides a deep evaluation of the energy consumption of routing protocols. The evaluation is done along with other metrics such as throughput and packet delivery ratio (PDR). We introduce two more metrics to capture the efficiency of the energy consumption: e-throughput and e-PDR. Both are ratios in relation to the energy. We consider the three low layers of the stack. Three types of routing protocols are used: proactive, reactive, and hybrid. At the MAC and PHY layer, three radio types are considered: 802.11a/b/g. Finally, the number of nodes is varying in random topologies, with nodes being static or mobile. Simulations are conducted using NS3. The parameters of a real network interface card are used. From the results in mobile position scenarios, no protocol is outperforming the others; even if OLSR has the lowest energy consumption, most of the time. However, in constant position scenarios, AODV consumed a lower energy, apart from the scenarios using the 802.11a standard where HWMP energy consumption is the lowest. Regarding the energy efficiency, AODV protocols provided the best e-throughput and OLSR the best e-PDR in overall configurations. A framework for selecting energy-efficient routing protocol depending on network characteristics is proposed at the end.

Highlights

We evaluated the performance of three routing protocols namely AODV, Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) and Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol (HWMP) with regard to energy consumption under NS3 in this work
We evaluated the impact of mobility over the energy consumption
It emerged from this work that basically AODV could offer the minimum energy consumption followed by OLSR

Summary

Introduction

This easy-to-deploy technology appears as an appealing solution to reduce the digital divide and to connect hard-to-wire areas. An ad-hoc network is composed of a set of nodes coming together in order to create a network without a central infrastructure. This type of network is self-organized; it can reconfigure itself when a node joins or leaves the network. In the latter case, we talk about mobile ad-hoc networks usually shortened MANETs [1]. Avoiding communication from passing through a central node provides some robustness to the network. MANETs can be considered as a special type of wireless mesh networks (WMNs): client mesh network [2]

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Results

Conclusion