Energy Consumption in Ad-Hoc Routing Protocols: Comparing DSR, AODV, and Tora
Yasser Gadallah and Thomas Kunz
Carleton University
http://kunz-pc.sce.carleton.ca/
tkunz@sce.carleton.ca

Motivation
Mobile Devices constrained by many things, one of them being battery
Sending and receiving messages is one of the more power-expensive operations
Data packets
Control packets of routing protocol
Wireless Interfaces also consumer substantial amount of power while idle, but putting them into the low-power “sleep” mode has to be done carefully
Goal: study power consumption of popular MANET routing protocols
to understand their energy behaviour, and
to draw lessons for the design of more efficient routing protocols

Energy Metrics
What is an “energy-efficient” routing protocol?
Possible Metrics:
Minimize energy consumed/packet,
Maximize time to network partition,
Minimize variance in node energy levels,
Minimize cost/packet, and
Minimize maximum node cost.
We used: average overall amount of consumed energy
Note: if minimizing energy consumption was only goal, a trivial optimal solution exists: drop all packets J
Therefore, need to also consider packet delivery ratio

Energy Model
Assumption: only wireless interface consumes energy (i.e., internal processing of messages etc. is “free”)
NS2 has (simplistic) energy model: “The energy model in a node has a initial value which is the level of energy the node has at the beginning of the simulation. This is known as initialEnergy. It also has a given energy usage for every packet it transmits and receives. These are called txPower and rxPower”
Default IDLE energy consumption is zero, send/receive costs independent of packet size, unicast/broadcast, etc.

Energy Model
Re-implement energy model to correspond to published measurements of actual IEEE 802.11 interface:
Consumed energy per packet = m * (packet size) + b
m and b are empirical constants that are based on whether the packet is being sent, received, promiscuously handled or discarded. They also depend on the operation type (unicast vs. broadcast).
Idle power: 0.8 Watts

Routing Protocols and Simulation Environment
Routing Protocols:
AODV: on-demand protocol with traditional routing tables
DSR: source routing, route caches, nodes (optionally) listen promiscuously to learn information to update cache
TORA: link reversal algorithm, maintains enough info so that link failure not necessarily results in new route discovery, more complex control messages
Simulation Environment: “the usual”
NS2, 50 nodes, 1500 x 300 m, initial power: 1000 Joules
CBR sources, 5 packets/s, 512 byte packets, 12 senders
Random waypoint model, 20 m/s max speed, variable pause time
600 seconds simulation length, 4 different movement patterns per scenario

Analytical and Simulation Results
Functional Comparison Results
protocol analysis: predict that AODV and DSR should perform similarly, with TORA being worse
Simulation Results: not quite that (at first sight)

Simulation Results (cont)
Problem: TORA delivers far fewer packets (i.e., saves energy by not delivering them often enough at the destination!), based on the simulation conditions that we used

Simulation Results: Energy Balance

Simulation Results:
Idle Energy Consumption Matters

Conclusions and Future Work
Conclusions:
AODV consumes slightly less energy than DSR at comparable packet delivery ratio
DSR seems to have slightly more balanced energy consumption between nodes (based on the difference (max - min) of nodal energy consumption)
Idle energy is about half of total energy consumed
Future Work:
Design protocol that is energy-efficient and fair (i.e., balanced) – work under way
Compare to other published energy efficient routing protocols such as SPAN, etc.