Altruism for Energy Efficiency in Ad Hoc Networks

In ad hoc networks, the energy consumption can be critical as wireless devices are mainly not connected to some constant source of energy. Algorithms that optimize the energy consumption are mainly based on local decisions, as each node tries to minimize the cost of forwarding packets by using information of his own battery state. In this paper, we try to approach the problem of optimizing energy consumption from another point of view. Considering the ad hoc network as a population of nodes, we try to exploit the idea of changing the behavior of the given node, so that they should not work selfishly but altruistically. As showed in evolution theory or in economics, the altruism can bring benefits to the whole population. As our simulation results show, the altruist behavior of the nodes can help us to decrease the energy consumption of the overall population in georouting based ad hoc networks.