Improving routing performance through m-limited forwarding in power-constrained wireless ad hoc networks

We present m-limited forwarding, a technique to reduce the cost of disseminating information in a power-constrained environment by limiting the cardinality of the subset of nodes which retransmit a packet. We show how this technique can be used to improve the performance of ad hoc routing protocols. m-AODV applies m-limited forwarding to the AODV routing protocol, and is used for networks with symmetric connections. We implemented m-A4LP, a protocol which can take advantage of the asymmetric links found in heterogeneous networks consisting of nodes with different transmission ranges. We quantify the benefits of the enhanced routing protocols and report the results of a simulation study regarding the power consumption of the nodes and the packet loss ratio. We conclude that m-AODV outperforms plain AODV and LAR in general scenarios, and m-A4LP shows a significantly lower packet loss ratio than AODV in heterogeneous networks.