An Energy Consumption Model for Performance Analysis of Routing Protocols for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

A mobile ad hoc network (or manet) is a group of mobile, wireless nodes which cooperatively form a network independent of any fixed infrastructure or centralized administration. In particular, a manet has no base stations: a node communicates directly with nodes within wireless range and indirectly with all other nodes using a dynamically-computed, multi-hop route via the other nodes of the manet.Simulation and experimental results are combined to show that energy and bandwidth are substantively different metrics and that resource utilization in manet routing protocols is not fully addressed by bandwidth-centric analysis. This report presents a model for evaluating the energy consumption behavior of a mobile ad hoc network. The model was used to examine the energy consumption of two well-known manet routing protocols. Energy-aware performance analysis is shown to provide new insights into costly protocol behaviors and suggests opportunities for improvement at the protocol and link layers.