| Multi-hop wireless ad hoc and sensor networks eradicate the costs of infrastructure deployment, setup, and administration. Ad hoc wireless networks allow anywhere, anytime network connectivity with complete lack of control, ownership, and regulatory influence. The intricate problem of energy conservation in wireless ad hoc and sensor networks is of great significance due to the limited battery capacity of the participating mobile devices. Hence, ad hoc routing protocols ought to be energy conservative. However, the simulation studies carried out for table-driven and on-demand ad hoc routing protocols fall short of examining essential power-based performance metrics, such as average node and network lifetime, energy-based protocol fairness, average dissipated energy per protocol, and standard deviation of the energy dissipated by each individual node. In this thesis, we present a thorough energy-based performance study of power-aware routing protocols for wireless mobile ad hoc networks. Our energy consumption model is based on a detailed implementation of the IEEE 802.11 physical layer convergence protocol (PLCP) and medium access control (MAC) sublayers. To our best knowledge, this is the first such detailed performance study.; Moreover, we propose, based on the findings of our energy-based performance study, two novel optimal energy-efficient schemes for path selection and load assignment, namely, Energy-Constrained Path Selection (ECPS) and Energy-Efficient Load Assignment (E2LA). Both schemes employ probabilistic dynamic programming techniques and utilize cross-layer interactions between the network and MAC layers. Despite the fact that energy conservation is achieved, there is no provision of a deterministically guaranteed minimum system lifetime.; We next develop a novel deterministic framework that allows the admission of flows without jeopardizing the limited energy of the wireless stations. This framework alleviates congestion by using multiple routes and through contention mitigation. Similar to ECPS and E2LA, it may be used with any existing energy-efficient routing scheme. Our experiments reveal that load balancing is achieved amongst the routes and the nodes in the wireless ad hoc network without violating any of the energy constraints, and while adhering to a deterministically pre-computed minimum system lifetime. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
