An Energy-efficient Routing Protocol for MANETs: a Particle Swarm Optimization Approach

Abstract

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are infrastructure-free networks created by wireless mobile devices with restrictedbattery life. This limited battery capacity in MANETs makes it necessary to consider the energy-awareness feature intheir design. Since routing protocols have central role in MANETs, their energy-awareness increases network life timeby efficiently using of the available limited energy. TORA is one of these routing protocols that offer high degree ofscalability. This paper employs the Binary Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm (BPSO) to add the energyawarenessfeature to the TORA routing protocol. The proposed protocol considers routes length in its route selectionprocess and also includes routes energy level in its calculations. It formulates the routing issue as an optimizationproblem and then employs BPSO to choose a route that maximizes a weighted function of the route length and theroute energy level. Extensive simulations in ns-2 simulator environment show that the proposed routing protocol,called BPSO-TORA, prolongs the network lifetime remarkably and outperforms TORA in terms of network life time,system life time and total delivered data.