A cooperation-based approach to energy optimization in wireless ad hoc networks

A well known and still open issue for wireless ad hoc networks is the unfair energy consumption among the nodes. The specific position of certain nodes composing an ad hoc network makes them more involved in network operations than others, causing a faster drain of their energy. To better distribute the energy level and increase the lifetime of the whole network, we propose to periodically force the cooperation of less cooperative nodes while overwhelmed ones deliberately stop their service. A dedicated ad hoc network routing protocol is introduced to discover alternative paths without degradation in the overall network performance. Received on 13 January 2015; accepted on 06 August 2015; published on 11 August 2015