Software-oriented routing protocol for energy-efficient wireless communications

Abstract

Wireless ad-hoc networks are getting more important in various applications like V2V (vehicle-to-vehicle) networks and opportunistic networks. Here, it is critical to reduce the electric energy consumption of nodes in networks. Each node consumes more energy to perform software processes to send and receive messages than the wireless communication devices. The farther node $$p:j$$ sends a message to a node $$p:i$$, the higher probability the node $$p:i$$ loses the message due to noise. Then, the node $$p:j$$ retransmits the lost message to the node $$p:i$$. This means, the more number of times the node $$p:i$$ transmits a message, the more energy the node $$p:i$$ consumes. The energy to be consumed by a node more depends on the number of transmissions of each message than the strength of radio emission. We have to decrease the number of transmissions of a message of each node in order to reduce the energy consumption of the node. In this paper, we first define a model to give the energy to be consumed by each node to deliver a message to another node. Then, we propose a pair of an EEU (Energy-Efficient Unicast) protocol and an RU (Reliable Unicast) protocol to find an energy-efficient route from a source node to a destination node. In the evaluation, we show the energy consumption and delivery probability of nodes can be improved in the proposed EEU and RU protocols.