Balancing transmission power and hop count in ad hoc unicast routing with swarm intelligence

This paper describes CEDAR, a unicast routing protocol that balances transmission power and hop count in ad hoc networks. The protocol adopts the mechanism of swarm intelligence to dynamically assign transmission power to nodes along the discovered route (to reduce the sum of transmission power) subject to an end-to-end hop count constraint in data delivery. Simulation results validated the effectiveness of the protocol, and demonstrated the tradeoff relationship between end-to-end total transmission power and hop count.