The Design And Implement Of Routing Protocol In Low-Power Ad Hoc Networks

An Ad Hoc Network is a kind of wireless network that does not need fixed infrastructure and features flexibility, node mobility. Therefore, it is able to build a network platform for military and civil applications quickly. In some applications, nodes in Ad Hoc Networks use battery for the purpose of portability. Under this condition, it is the key factor affecting the network performance that the overall power consumption of a network node is reduced effectively.SOPC not only runs fast and uses less resource, but also has the advantages of small volume and low power consumption. It is suitable for power critical equipment in an Ad Hoc Network. Therefore, Spartan-6 is selected to implement a SOPC system. The designed node platform does not load the operating system and need external RAM, which can reduce the additional power consumption. In addition, an novel protocol DSR-SNF(DSR-Selected Node Forwarding), which improves the flooding mechanism in DSR protocol, is proposed. The new algorithm uses RREQ(Route Request) and RREP(Route Reply) to obtain the information of the neighbors within two hops. Since a RREP message carries the neighbors of sending nodes, each node in the network will know the information of neighbors within two hops after two floodings of routing information. A node set, SNF, can be computed by using the gathered information. The SNF set includes the necessary one-hop nodes as less as possible for covering all the two hop nodes. The nodes in the set can forward RREQ, so that the number of routing control packets and power consumption can be reduced significantly. The data packet can cover the entire network with the least forwarding times when being broadcast through the SNF set. Such an approach will reduce overhead and power consumption of the network.Finally, a simulation software is used to simulate several different network scenarios in this paper. Comparing the numbers of route control message between the traditional DSR protocol and the DSR-SNF protocol in different scenarios, we conclude that the DSR-SNF protocol consumes less power and suits the design of Ad Hoc Networks platform better.