Energy Efficient Routing Protocols for Wireless Ad HOC Networks - A Survey

Reducing energy consumption, primarily with the goal of extending the lifetime of battery-powered devices, has emerged as a fundamental challenge in wireless communication. The performance of the medium access control (MAC) scheme not only has a fairly significant end-result on the behaviour of the routing approach employed, but also on the energy consumption of the wireless network interface card (NIC). We investigate the inadequacies of the MAC schemes designed for ad hoc wireless networks in the context of power awareness herein. The topology changes due to uncontrollable factors such as node mobility, weather, interference, noise, as well as on controllable parameters such as transmission power and antenna direction results in significant amount of energy loss. Controlling rapid topology changes by minimizing the maximum transmission power used in ad hoc wireless networks, while still maintaining networks connectivity can prolong battery life and hence network lifetime considerably. In addition, we systematically explore the potential energy consumption pitfalls of non-power-based and power based routing schemes. We suggest a thorough energy-based performance survey of energy aware routing protocols for wireless mobile ad-hoc networks. We also present the statistical performance metrics measured by our simulations.