Energy, Transmission Power and Data Rate Aware Routing on Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Resumo Modern wireless networks can vary both the transmission power and modulation of links. Existing routing protocols do not take transmission power control (TPC) and modulation adaptation (also known as rate adaptation – RA) into account, even though the performance of MANETs can be significantly improved when routing algorithms use link characteristics to build their routes. TPC unaware routing consumes more energy and increases contention, reducing latency and the throughput of the network. Similarly, RA-unaware routes use low data rate links, increasing the utilization of the medium. This paper proposes and evaluates modifications to routing protocols to cope with TPC and RA. The modifications can be applied to either proactive or reactive protocols that employ cost functions. We present an analytical model of end-to-end energy consumption and latency for multi-hop MANETs, which is used to justify the design decisions taken in our routing extensions. Results show that TPC-and RA-aware routing algorithms can improve the end-to-end throughput by up to 30% and the average latency by up to one order of magnitude, while consuming less energy than traditional protocols.