EALBM: Energy aware load balancing multipath routing protocol for MANETs

Abstract

A number of new routing protocols such as Traffic-Size Aware scheme (TSA), Dynamic Load-Aware Routing (DLAR), Load Balanced Ad Hoc Routing (LBAR), Receiver-oriented Load-balancing and Reliable Routing (RLRR)and Ring-based Energy AwareRouting (REAR) have been proposed recently to deal with load balancing in MANET. The primary objective of load balancing routing protocols is to divert traffic from routes which are currently congested. The drawback of current routing protocols is that they select paths with least node activity, least cost, least hop count, least load or those with smaller interface queues. However, if the path with the least metric will be selected every time then this could congest this path could get more loaded than others. Eventually some of the nodes along path could die. We address this problem byproposing Energy efficient and Load Balancing Multi-path(EALBM) routing protocol which uses multiple paths at the same time. EALBM is an on demand routing protocol, it has three phases of working: neighbor discovery, multipath discovery and data transmission. The source initiates multipath discovery process to determine all existing disjoint multipath from source to destination. Each disjoint path is assigneda weight based on the energy level of nodes along that path. The path with maximum energy has least weight i.e. most preferred. To validate our protocol we implemented EALBM in NS2. We created four different scenarios, static nodes with same or different energy level of nodes, and dynamic node mobility with same or different energy of nodes. Our results show that EALBM performs better than Ad hoc On demand Multipath Distance Vector (AOMDV). The throughput of EALBM is higher by 6% (static nodes) upto 16% (dynamic topology) as compared to AOMDV. The packet delivery ratio of EALBM is higher by 7% (static) upto 52% (dynamic) as compared to AOMDV. The packet loss, latency and normalized load in case of EALBM are also substantially lower than AOMDV.