Exploring the Stability-Energy Consumption-Delay-Network Lifetime Tradeoff of Mobile Ad Hoc Network Routing Protocols

We present a detailed ns-2 [1] based simulation analysis on four of the prominent mobile ad hoc network routing protocols: Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol [2], Associativity-Based Routing (ABR) protocol [3], FlowOriented Routing Protocol (FORP) [4] and the Routelifetime Assessment Based Routing (RABR) protocol [5]. The simulations were conducted with and without transmission power control. We define transmission power control for a hop comprising of a sender and receiver as the problem of choosing the transmission power at the sender depending on the distance to the intended receiver. Route stability is quantified using the number of route transitions (route discoveries) incurred for a source-destination session. We also define the network lifetime as the time of first node failure due to exhaustion of node battery power. Our simulation results indicate a stability versus {energy consumption-delay-network lifetime} tradeoff among the four routing protocols: FORP routes are more stable than RABR routes, which are more stable than ABR routes, which are more stable than DSR routes. With respect to the end-to-end delay per packet, network lifetime, the energy consumed per node and the energy consumed per packet, DSR is better than ABR, which is better than RABR, which is better than FORP. We observe this tradeoff for simulations conducted with and without transmission power control. Nevertheless, the crucial observation is that by using transmission power control, the tradeoff could be reduced: the higher the stability of the routing protocol, the larger is the magnitude of reduction in the energy consumption and improvement in the network lifetime.