An Energy Entropy-based power-conserving multicast routing of ad hoc networks

A Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is a dynamic wireless network that can be formed without the need for any pre-existing infrastructure in which each node can act as a router. Due to energy constraint and dynamic topology of mobile ad hoc networks, multicast supported routing is a very important research issue. MAODV (Multicast Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector) routing protocol provides fast and efficient route establishment between mobile nodes that need to communicate with each other in MANET. By analyzing the operation mechanism of MAODV, this paper presents an Energy Entropy-based multicast routing protocol in MAODV (EEMAODV). The key idea of the protocol is to find the minimal nodal residual energy of each route in the process of selecting path by descending nodal residual energy. It can balance individual nodes battery power utilization and hence prolong the entire networks lifetime. Simulation results show that the proposed EEMAODV routing protocol performed better than MAODV.