Battery-aware Routing in Personal Networks

ISSN： 0929-6212

Source： Wireless Personal Communications, Vol.71, Iss.1, 2013-07, pp. : 651-678

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Abstract

A personal network (PN) is a network of devices belonging to a person. It can consist of a number of ad hoc sub-networks which are linked together through the Internet. We study battery-aware routing for multi-hop connectivity in sub-networks of PNs, and propose a new algorithm. The proposed algorithm takes the advantage of having mains-connected devices in a PN to direct the traffic to such devices and avoid relaying over nodes with low battery energy. A consequence of this strategy is directing the traffic load to static nodes of the network as well, since mains-connected nodes are static while battery-powered nodes could be mobile. This results in less route failures due to less mobility of nodes along a chosen path. We comprehensively compare the performance of our proposed algorithm with the performance of some well-known algorithms from the literature. We consider the effect of node density, routing overhead, heterogeneity of nodes in terms of their power supplies, gateway-oriented communication, mobility of nodes, and transmission power control, on the performance of battery-aware routing algorithms in PNs. Taking into account various parameters and different scenarios, we show that directing the traffic to mains-powered nodes can profoundly increase operational lifetime of the network. Our algorithm, as well as the results of our work, can also be applied to other types of ad hoc networks with heterogeneous power supplies.