Evaluating Energy-Aware Behavior of Proactive and Reactive Routing Protocols for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Ad hoc routing technology has been developed primarily for networks of mobile nodes. In many cases the operational life of a node will be limited by its power source, so power consumption can be a critical issue. All the layers of communication are coupled in power consumption. Ad hoc routing protocols may consume different amounts of power and their routing decisions may be conditioned. Power consumption must be distributed on the nodes of the network and the overall transmission power for each connection must be minimized. The authors have therefore modelled two contrasting protocols for the MANETs (Mobile Ad Hoc NETworks), namely the reactive protocol DSR (Dynamic Source Routing) and the proactive protocol OLSR (Optimized Link State Routing).