Lifetime Estimation and Measurement for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANET) is a popular choice for “wireless communication network” due to ease of deployment. Nodes in MANET are battery operated, movable, and compact. They can sense, manipulate and communicate data wirelessly. Limited battery power of the nodes is one of the major constraints of MANET. This paper proposes a network lifetime model that considers residual energy and actual discharge rate of the battery along with the energy consumption in different modes like transmit, receive, sleep, idle, active and processing while calculating the lifetime. A circuit implementation of node with Arduino Mega 2560, ZigBee transceiver, 2100 mAh NiMH rechargeable battery was done to compare lifetime with conventional dynamic source routing (DSR) and modified Least Max Dynamic Source Routing (LMDSR) algorithms. The DSR algorithm always selects the shortest path between source and destination nodes. But the LMDSR algorithm also considers the residual battery levels of the nodes to avoid overuse of the node(s) with low battery. This will prevent the early exhaustion of node(s) which may be the reason for reduced network lifetime. The result analysis shows that the implementation of LMDSR algorithm improves the network lifetime on an average by 31% and reduces the energy consumption by 21% with a slight decrease in throughput.