Distributed Energy-conserving Routing Protocols

This paper discusses several distributed poweraware routing protocols in wireless ad-hoc networks (especially sensor networks). We seek to optimize the lifetime of the network. We have developed three distributed power-aware algorithms and analyzed their efficiency in terms of the number of message broadcasts and the overall network lifetime modeled as the time to the first message that can not be sent. These are: (1) a distributed min Power algorithm (modeled on a distributed version of Dijkstra’s algorithm), (2) a distributed max-min algorithm, and (3) the distributed version of our the centralized online max-min zPmin algorithm presented in [12]. The first two algorithms are used to define the third, although they are very interesting and useful on their own for applications where the optimization criterion is the minimum power, respectively the maximum residual power. The distributed max-min zPmin algorithm optimizes the overall lifetime of the network by avoiding nodes of low power, while not using too much total power.