Maximum battery life routing to support ubiquitous mobile computing in wireless ad hoc networks

Abstract

Most ad hoc mobile devices today operate on batteries. Hence, power consumption becomes an important issue. To maximize the lifetime of ad hoc mobile networks, the power consumption rate of each node must be evenly distributed, and the overall transmission power for each connection request must be minimized. These two objectives cannot be satisfied simultaneously by employing routing algorithms proposed in previous work. We present a new power-aware routing protocol to satisfy these two constraints simultaneously; we also compare the performance of different types of power-related routing algorithms via simulation. Simulation results confirm the need to strike a balance in attaining service availability performance of the whole network vs. the lifetime of ad hoc mobile devices.