Energy consumption in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) are composed of moving mobile nodes that are battery operated. This paper proposes a set of performance metrics in evaluating energy efficiency in MANETs, and studies the energy consumption of MANET from a variety of aspects: at different network layers including application layer, network layer and MAC layer, at different operation mode including idle, transmit and receive, and with different routing protocols including DSR, DSDV and AODV. Extensive simulations were run in the network simulator ns2 for various scenarios. The results and analysis reveal some important findings. A substantial amount of energy is consumed at MAC layer, especially at idle mode. IEEE 802.11 achieves completely different pattern in terms of its energy efficiency when combined with different routing protocols. DSR and DSDV are significant efficient than AODV in terms of energy consumption per successful data packet delivery.