An Energy-Efficient Broadcast Protocol in MANETs: Design and Evaluation

Energy efficiency is a critical issue in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) for increasing the lifetime of the individual nodes as well as the overall network. In this paper, we propose a new energy-efficient broadcast protocol called EBOLSR, which adapts the energy-efficient OLSR (EOLSR) protocol to the broadcasting domain. In order to maximize the broadcasting network lifetime, we take neighboring nodes’ residual energy into consideration when selecting multipoint relay (MPR) nodes. We evaluate the performance of EBOLSR by using NS2 and compare it with three other broadcast protocols, Classical Flooding, Simplified Multicast Forwarding (SMF), and the Coding-based Broadcast (CodeBCast) protocol. Simulation results show that EBOLSR results in less energy consumption and longer network lifetime than Classical Flooding. We also explain why EBOLSR does not outperform SMF or CodeBCast in terms of energy consumption and network lifetime.