Multipath Power Sensitive Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad hoc Networks

Mobile Ad hoc Networks are characterized by multi-hop wireless links, without any infrastructure, and frequent host mobility. A plethora of routing protocols has been proposed. A class of routing protocols called ondemand protocols has recently gained attention because of their efficiency and low routing overhead. As the mobile nodes in the network work on low power batteries, the need to take into account their power consumption arises. This paper focuses on a particular on-demand routing protocol, called Dynamic Source Routing, and shows how an efficient heuristic based multipath technique can improve the mean time to node failure and maintain the variance in the power of all the nodes as low as possible. In the Multipath Power Sensitive Routing Protocol (MPSR) every node in the network is treated equally and the overall network is stable for a long time. An interesting feature of using this protocol is that the end-to-end packet delay does not increase significantly. The results of extensive simulation show that the performance of MPSR protocol is on an increasing trend as mobility increases when compared to the Dynamic Source Routing.