A Power Aware Routing Strategy for Ad Hoc Networks with Directional Antenna Optimizing Control Traffic and Power Consumption

This paper addresses the problem of energy-efficient and power aware data routing strategies within the ad hoc networks using directional antennas and considers the battery power of each node as an important criteria while determining the route for data packet transmission. Energy depletion of nodes in ad hoc networks is one of the prime concerns for their sustained operation. Conventional routing strategies usually focus on minimizing the number of hops or minimizing route errors from the source node to the destination node. But they do not usually focus on the energy depletion of the nodes. Thus, the same node may be selected repeatedly, thereby causing its early depletion in energy. In our proposal, if a node in the network has heavily depleted its battery power, then an alternative node would be selected for routing so that not only the power of each node is used optimally but there is an automatic load sharing or balancing among the nodes in the network. The usage of directional antenna has some key advantages which outperforms the omni-directional counterpart. The space division multiple access and the range extension capabilities of the directional antenna is itself a reason for its choice. The power requirement of the directional antenna is also much less than that of the omni directional version covering the same range. A salient feature of directional antenna is that it doesn’t overhear the nodes outside its own cone of coverage and allows simultaneous communication without interference. This additionally helps to reduce power depletion of nodes. We illustrate how directional antenna can be combined with the power aware routing strategy and, using simulations, we quantify the energy benefits and protocol scalability. Our initial evaluation offer encouraging results, indicating the potential benefits of power aware routing using directional antenna.