Battery-aware Routing in Personal Networks

A Personal Network (PN) is a network of devices belonging to a person. It may consist of a number of ad hoc sub-networks which are linked together through the Internet or any other means. We study battery-aware routing in PNs, and propose a new battery-aware routing algorithm for multi-hop communication in sub-networks of PNs. The proposed algorithm considers the remaining battery energy of nodes and takes the advantage of having mains-connected devices in a PN to avoid relaying over nodes with scarce battery energy and direct the traffic load to mains-powered nodes. A consequence of this strategy is directing the traffic load to static nodes of the network as well, since mains-connected nodes are static while battery-powered nodes could be mobile. This results in less route failures due to mobility of nodes. We comprehensively compare the performance of our proposed algorithm with the performance of some well-known algorithms from the literature. In our comparison, we consider the effect of node density, routing overhead, heterogeneity of nodes in terms of their power supplies, gateway-oriented communication, mobility of nodes, and transmission power control on the performance of battery-aware routing algorithms in personal networks. Taking into account various parameters and different scenarios, we show that directing the traffic to mains-powered nodes, as being done by our proposed algorithm, can profoundly increase operational lifetime of the network. Our algorithm, as well as the results of our work, can also be applied to other types of ad hoc networks with heterogeneous power supplies such as wireless mesh networks.