Power-aware routing based on the energy drain rate for mobile ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc networks' (MANETs) inherent power limitation makes power-awareness a critical requirement for MANET protocols. We propose a new routing metric, the drain rate, which predicts the lifetime of a node as a function of current traffic conditions. We describe the minimum drain rate (MDR) mechanism which uses a combination of the drain rate with remaining battery capacity to establish routes. MDR can be employed by any existing MANET routing protocol to achieve a dual goal: extend both nodal battery life and connection lifetime. Using the ns-2 simulator and the dynamic source routing (DSR) protocol, we compared MDR to the minimum total transmission power routing (MTPR) scheme and the min-max battery cost routing (MM-BCR) scheme and proved that MDR is the best approach to achieve the dual goal.