Hybrid cellular-MANETs: An energy-aware routing design

It is well-recognized that our dependence on mobile communications grows; however, users of wireless devices may encounter inadequate coverage due to a variety of shortage and outage circumstances. This is an especially urgent issue in disaster areas where the access to outside world is critical for rescue operations. In this paper, we present a self-organizing communication framework for extending wireless coverage for mobile devices, without requiring modifications of existing wireless infrastructures. Participating devices form a hybrid cellular - mobile ad hoc network, relaying data off net through the nodes that have cellular connections. We design a low-complexity, energy-aware, multi-path data routing mechanism for this frame-work. The proposed routing includes two major components: a baseline routing that includes a locally reactive and hence low-complexity routing sub-component to handle mobility; and an energy-aware multi-path routing that is motivated by an energy optimization problem and uses only local information. Packet-level simulations show that the proposed routing scheme achieves good performance in delay, packet delivery, and energy consumption. In addition, we implement this framework on Android devices and conduct phone-in-the-loop emulations. The results from the emulation show that the proposed routing scheme can achieve more efficient energy utilization.