Energy conservation through resource-aware movement in heterogeneous mobile ad hoc networks

Energy conservation in mobile ad hoc networks is of paramount importance because most mobile nodes usually have very limited energy supply. Previous research on this issue focused on the design at the network or MAC or physical layer. In this paper, we study this problem from the new perspective of node mobility, i.e., analyzing the impact of node movement on energy conservation. In particular, armed with the inherent resource heterogeneity in mobile ad hoc networks, we propose a novel resource-aware movement strategy to make better use of some powerful nodes to achieve energy conservation. We also formulate the resource-aware movement as a NP-complete distance-constrained least-cost (DCLC) routing problem and propose an efficient heuristic solution. Extensive simulations have been used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes.