Un protocole de routage à basse consommation d'énergie pour les MANETs

Abstract: Maximizing network lifetime is a very challenging issue in routing protocol design for Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANETs), since mobile nodes are powered by limited-capacity batteries. Furthermore, replacing or recharging batteries is often impossible in critical environments (e.g. battlefields, disaster areas, etc.). Energy consumption was considered for a long time equivalent to bandwidth consumption. However, recent works have shown that "energy" and "bandwidth" are substantially different metrics. Moreover, it was found that traditional routing policies such as "the shortest path" one can have a negative impact on energy consumption balance. Therefore, several new approaches have been proposed addressing energy efficiency explicitly. Our work is related to energy efficient routing for MANETs' problem. The proposed MEA-DSR (Multipath Energy-Aware on Demand Source Routing) protocol is based on a load sharing strategy between mobile nodes in order to maximize network lifetime. To achieve this goal, we used multipath routing; nodes' residual energies and paths length were also considered when making routing decisions. Simulation results have shown the efficiency of the proposed protocol under difficult scenarios characterised by high mobility, high density and important traffic load.