Swarm Congestion & Power Aware Routing Protocol for MANETs

The evolution of wireless devices along with the increase in user mobility have created new challenges such as the need to make efficient use of power resources. Nodes in an ad hoc network have limited power resources as well as limited processing power. When routing, a sharp degradation in the network service may result if the routing algorithm does not account for the limited resources, eventually decreasing the network lifetime. The objective of our work is to extend the life time of ad hoc networks through implementing a multi-path congestion and power aware routing protocol. The protocol developed is a swarm-based routing protocol that incorporated both power awareness and load balancing techniques. PowerAnt extended network lifetime by 33% on average; besides, it provided a cheaper energy routing strategy per byte by 23% compared with AODV.