An Energy Aware Routing Algorithm for Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks: Concept and Performance

Energy efficient management is one of the issues which affect the practical deployment of wireless ad hoc sensor networks, as it directly impacts on network reliability and durability. In this paper we propose and analyse a power aware zone routing-like communication scheme to be used in ad hoc sensor networks. The algorithm is conceived to efficiently manage the transmission-reception resources in the network nodes during path discovery and routing. This will ultimately lead to optimizing the average energy consumption in the nodes. The algorithm is based on each node having a two-hop list of contacts and a simple distributed reasoning mechanism guided by two heuristic objectives: on the one hand, avoiding redundant sending of messages; on the other hand, cooperatively finding the route which locally minimizes the delay in completing the required communication transaction. We describe the basics of the algorithm, and include some performance figures in comparison with the "optimal" and with a pure "flooding" scheme, for a given reference network topology. Finally we include a preliminary qualitative discussion about the optimal size of the list of contacts as a function of the size of the network