Energy aware routing scheme for mobile ad hoc network using variable range transmission

A Mobile Ad hoc Network is a collection of mobile nodes that dynamically forms networks temporarily without the need for any pre-existing infrastructure. Today, one of the main issues in MANETs is the development of energy efficient protocols due to limited bandwidth and battery life. The nodes in MANETs operate by a battery source which has limited energy reservoir. Power failure of a node affects the node’s ability to forward packets on behalf of others, thus reducing the network lifetime. The conventional MANET routing protocols s. a. DSR and AODV use common transmission range for transfer of data and does not consider energy status of nodes. This paper discusses a new energy aware routing (EAR) scheme which uses variable transmission range. The protocol has been incorporated along with the route discovery procedure of AODV as a case study. Both the protocols are simulated using Network Simulator-2 and comparisons are made to analyze their performance based on energy consumption, network lifetime and number of alive nodes metrics for different network scenarios. The results show that EAR makes effective node energy utilization.