An energy-efficient transmission scheme for monitoring of combat soldier health in tactical mobile ad hoc networks

In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient transmission scheme for monitoring soldier health in tactical mobile ad hoc networks (T-MANET). In the proposed scheme, a constrained route discovery algorithm is used to determine feasible routing paths between the source nodes and sink node. A cross-layer optimization approach is then used to determine the optimal routes and minimum power required to transmit data in the military UHF band such that the end-to-end packet delivery ratio (PDR) and end-to-end delay objectives are met. However, the optimal solution requires exponential complexity and is not suitable for implementation in resource constrained sensor motes. Therefore, we propose a heuristic algorithm called joint link node power allocation (JPA) that allocates power based on the presence of joint link nodes. From the analysis and numerical results, we find that JPA achieves energy consumption that is within 24% of the optimal value, but significantly reduces the solution complexity from exponential to polynomial by utilizing 6 times fewer iterations than the optimal solution to converge to a minimum energy solution.