ENL-AODV: Energy and Load-Based Routing Protocol in Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a network with no infrastructure, operating on wireless mobile nodes. MANET consists of quickly deployable, independent as well as self-configuring nodes with no centralized administration. There is no fixed topology in the network and the nodes have limited energy and computing resources. Jitter, a small random variation in timing, is widely used in between the periodic transmission of the control message in wireless communication protocols. It is an especially important technique during route discovery process when a process may cause a situation where adjacent nodes have to broadcast concurrently, then the use of jitter makes a protocol able to avoid concurrent packet transmissions over the same channel by neighboring nodes in the network. In AODV, a small delay during the flooding of a control message is used during route discovery process to avoid simultaneous packet transmission by neighboring nodes, which might result in the collision between these packets. The proposed energy and load-based protocol (ENL-AODV) introduces energy and load factor in the calculation of jitter while forwarding of route requests (RREQs), making it select the path with enough energy to transfer the data packet. As simulation results describe, ENL-AODV improves the efficiency of ad hoc networks, increases packet delivery ratio, throughput, and network lifetime, and also decreases average end-to-end delay.