Link Life Time and Energy-Aware Stable Routing for MANETs

Abstract

One of the major problems in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) routing is the short lifetime of their routes. This problem has roots in the dynamic topology of the network and the limited battery capacity of its nodes. One of the solutions to upgrade the efficiency of this routing scheme is necessary to select the most stable paths to reduce the latency and the overhead arising from the routes’ reconstructions. This paper designs a routing protocol that calculates multiple stable paths between the source and the destination and then selects the best available path among them. The proposed protocol is based on the AODV protocol. In comparison with previous works on AODV, this work has two significant improvements. First, it selects only node-disjoints paths, hence failure of one path doesn’t affect other paths. Second, it selects high-quality stable routes using an efficient formula. Extensive simulations in the NS-2 environment show that the proposed protocol called ST-AODV (Stable Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector) outperforms AODV in terms of packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, routing frequency, and routing overhead.