Lifetime-Aware Leisure Degree Adaptive Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The intrinsic flexibility and independence of infrastructure enables mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) to be widely used in various environments such as disaster rescue, and battlefield. The conventional and power-aware routing protocols mainly hold strong preferences to the "shortest paths" and "minimal energy consumption paths" respectively, neglecting the real traffic on those paths, which may lead to so called "hot spots" on some links where heavy traffic converges. The load-aware protocols did not consider the remaining energy of each node, which is critical to a MANET. Therefore, we extend our proposed leisure degree adaptive routing (LDAR) algorithm [9] by presenting a new combined metric "lifetime-aware leisure degree", which reflects the transmission state, the remaining energy, and energy drain rate in a node as a whole. Based on this metric and a cross-layer design method involving the medium access control (MAC) layer and the network layer, we design a new routing protocol "Lifetime-aware Leisure Degree Adaptive Routing"(l-LDAR), which uses a heuristic route selection mechanism in order to efficiently control the congestion and to balance the traffic load. Using this protocol, we can prolong the network lifetime and improve the performance of MANET. Simulation results show that 1-LDAR performs better than the Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) and the LDAR routing protocols under the circumstances of both static networks and mobile networks.