An efficient energy aware link stable multipath routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks in urban areas

Abstract

Ad Hoc wireless mobile networks are characterized by a lack of central administration and the fact that any element of the network, being very mobile, is susceptible to disappear. In an Ad Hoc network, all the elements must cooperate in order to establish a temporary network to communicate. This communication is affected by the links stability mainly in a restricted environment such as a city and the depletion of the batteries energy of the nodes. These factors degrade the ad hoc networks performance. We propose in this paper a stable routing protocol with weak energy consumption for urban areas in order to improve these performances. The proposed solution is a multipath protocol named ESMRua (Efficient energy aware and Link Stable Multipath Routing Protocol in urban areas). ESMRua uses a path selection scheme based on energy constraint, signal quality and link stability. For the link stability, three calculation variants are used. ESMRua will be designed for realistic mobility, contrary to the main existing protocols which are designed to the random mobility models; these models have unrealistic behaviors such as a brusque acceleration and a sudden stop. Simulation results show that our multipath protocol enhances the performance of the ad hoc networks, mainly in terms of routing overhead, energy consumption and network reliability.