A Stable Power-Aware Multicast Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a dynamically reconfigurable wireless network that does not have a fixed infrastructure. Due to the high mobility of nodes, the network topology of MANETs changes very fast, making it more difficult to find the routes that message packets use. Because mobile nodes have limited battery power, it is therefore very important to use energy in a MANET efficiently. In this paper, we propose a power-aware multicast routing protocol (PMRP) with mobility prediction for MANETs. In order to select a subset of paths that provide increased stability and reliability of routes, in routing discovery, each node receives the RREQ packet and uses the power-aware metric to get in advance the power consumption of transmitted data packets. If the node has enough remaining power to transmit data packets, it uses the global positioning system (GPS) to get the location information (i.e. position, velocity and direction) of the mobile nodes and utilizes this information to calculate the link expiration time (LET) between two connected mobile nodes. During route discovery, each destination node selects the routing path with the smallest LET and uses this smallest link expiration time as the route expiration time (RET). The destination nodes collect several feasible routes and then selects the path with the longest RET as the primary routing path. Then the source node uses these routes between the source node and each destination node to create a multicast tree. In the multicast tree, the source node will be the root node and the destination nodes will be the leaf nodes. Simulation results show that the proposed PMRP outperforms MAODV.