Energy-conserving on-demand routing for multi-rate multi-hop networks

We present a novel scheme for conserving energy in multi-rate multi-hop wireless networks such as 802.11. In our approach, energy conservation is achieved by controlling the rebroadcast times of Route Request (RREQ) packets during path discovery in on-demand wireless routing protocols. The scheme is cross-layer in nature. At the network layer, the RREQ rebroadcast delay is controlled by the energy consumption information, and at the Physical layer, an energy consumption model is used to select both the rate and transmission range. The paper describes the energy-conserving algorithm at the network layer (ECAN), along with simulation results that compare the energy consumption of Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector routing (AODV) with and without ECAN.