A location-aided power-aware routing protocol in mobile ad hoc networks

In multi-hop wireless ad-hop networks, designing energy-efficient routing protocols is critical since nodes are power-constrained. However, it is also an inherently hard problem due to two important factors: First, the nodes may be mobile, demanding the energy-efficient routing protocol to be fully distributed and adaptive to the current states of nodes; Second, the wireless links may be uni-directional due to asymmetric power configurations of adjacent nodes. In this paper, we propose a location-aided power-aware routing protocol that dynamically makes local routing decisions so that a near-optimal power-efficient end-to-end route is formed for forwarding data packets. The protocol is fully distributed such that only location information of neighboring nodes are exploited in each routing node. Through rigorous theoretical analysis for our distributed protocol based on greedy algorithms, we are able to derive critical global properties with respect to end-to-end energy-efficient routes. Finally, preliminary simulation results are presented to verify the performance of our protocol