REDEAR: Relative Density Aware Routing Algorithm for Energy Efficiency in MANETs

Abstract

Next generation Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) need to deal with high speed, e.g., moving vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAVs). Typical MANET devices are battery operated and hence energy consumption is a critical issue. MANET requires robust routing protocols because of its dynamic nature. For dynamically changing network topology, reactive routing protocols find routes by broadcasting the control packets. For achieving energy efficiency, our proposed RElative DEnsity Aware Routing (REDEAR) algorithm makes sure that only selected nodes act as packet forwarders based on the relative node density with respect to the neighbors. Eventually the number of redundant Route Request (RREQ) messages is reduced. Moreover, we propose a variant of the proposed algorithm for further improvement in the energy efficiency for the higher node density MANETs. The proposed algorithm works effectively for low to very high speed MANETs. Extensive simulation studies confirm the energy efficiency of the proposal. We obtain an improved energy efficiency of up to 21.8% at low speed and up to 30% at very high speed vis-a-vis AODV reactive protocol. Our proposed algorithm results in better network lifetime and connectivity.