Efficient Power Aware AODV Routing Protocol for MANET

Mobile ad-hoc networks is an area in communication networks which is mostly known as MANETs. This type of network is made up of nodes which are independent and mobile. These mobile nodes are able to exchange messages between themselves without use of routers. Nodes in this network rely on limited battery, which is a major challenge in this field. When the node’s battery power has been drained, the node dies and it stops either sending or receiving messages. This action leads to a breakdown of an already established network. There is need for network reconstruction by creating new paths which avoid the dead node. Many solutions have been proposed to address this problem. These solutions make an attempt of increasing the network lifetime so as to avoid the many network reconstruction processes. The work in this paper makes an attempt of increasing network lifetime and also minimising the delay by selecting shortest path which has more energy. We therefore propose a new protocol which we name: Efficient Power Aware AODV. This work is a combination of two previously proposed works which are a modification of the normal operation of the widely used and known Ad hoc on-Demand Distance Vector routing protocol. In this paper we simulate our proposed protocol and compare its performance with existing techniques. We make our comparison on the following parameters: average energy consumption, percentage of dead nodes, packet delivery ratio and throughput. Our simulations were carried out using the network simulator, version 2.35 (NS2.35).