Energy Efficient Routing Protocols In Ad Hoc Networks

Nowadays, a lot of solutions have been proposed to save the power consumption and lengthen lifetime of nodes in the energy constrained Ad hoc networks. There are two mechanisms involved in these solutions. One is power management and control mechanism in the data link layer, and the other is power-aware (use the energy as the metric of the path) routing protocol in the network layer. All of these solutions are based on ideal wireless channel and non-retransmission data link, and only focused on specific problems of each layer. Therefore, these solutions cannot improve the energy efficiency in Ad hoc networks successfully and effectively.In this dissertation, we firstly established a simple mathematical model and an effective simulation model according to the character of energy consumption of nodes at different states. Secondly, we proposed a data transmission model with reliable link and a path length computation model. Both of them are based on the high error probability of wireless channel and IEEE 802.11 link layer protocol. And then, we proposed an energy efficient routing protocol with dynamic power adjustment named as DPAEER. DPAEER does not only take the expected energy to be consumed in the link as its cost, but also assign transmission power for all source nodes in order to minimize the length of path which is measured by energy. Thirdly, we proposed another path length computation model with the reliable transport layer. At the same time, we also proposed another power adjusting mechanism and energy efficient routing protocol in the reliable transport layer named as DPAEERT. Both DPAEER and DPAEERT integrate the power control mechanism into the energy efficient routing protocols and minimize the energy consumption by cross-layer optimization.Finally, we described the steps to implement the cross-layer power control mechanism and proposed energy efficient routing protocols, which are DPAEER and DPAEERT in Qualnet. Through extensive simulation experiments and deep analysis, the performance of the protocols is thoroughly evaluated.