Maximizing Lifetime of Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks with Optimal Cooperative Routing

Research in MANET is a challenging task because topology changes frequently and results in link breakages due to node mobility and fast over tiredness of node energy due to limited battery capacity. Therefore, the topology, node mobility, and energy are main important factors that have an impact over the performance of a routing protocol and decreases the overall lifetime of the network. In order to enhance the lifetime of the network, a cooperative communication scheme have been proposed in this paper. Cooperative communication requires cooperative table, relay table, and cooperative neighbor table to store the topological information and implement cooperative transmission among the nodes thereby improving the robustness against the node mobility. Cooperative communication uses multi-hop transmission between the source and destination nodes in order to save energy and thus enhancing the lifetime of the network using minimum energy consumption selection decode and forward (MESDF) routing protocol. The proposed scheme chooses the best relays with minimum energy consumption in a cooperative and distributed manner and considers the link break probability and energy harvesting techniques, to determine the optimal route across a cooperative network. Simulation results clearly shows that the robustness of proposed method increases against the node mobility and saves 21% of node energy in a selected route which in turn increases the lifetime of the network when compared to the existing cooperative and non-cooperative routing methods.