PHAODV: Power aware heterogeneous routing protocol for MANETs

Devices in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) have limited power resources and may be equipped with different transmission technologies. These characteristics make MANET traditional routing protocols inconvenient in a heterogeneous environment. Hence, the need for designing routing protocols that support interoperability between heterogeneous nodes and efficiently uses the available resources. In this paper, we propose a power aware routing protocol for a MANET formed of heterogeneous nodes. The proposed approach takes into consideration the battery status of nodes when building the routing table; in addition, in case of the existence of multiple routes between two nodes, the route that consumes least power is selected and the nodes falling on this route will be added to the routing table. Also, the proposed approach ensures fair distribution of routing load among the nodes and avoids exhausting nodes that are falling on optimal routes across the network, thus providing better connectivity and extending the network lifetime. We implemented the protocol as an extension to JiST/SWANS network simulator, and compared its performance to other heterogeneous and power aware routing protocols found in the literature.