Energy-awareness in multihop routing

Post date: Apr 15, 2015 12:28:46 AM

Energy awareness is a hop topic today that is being explored often in the context of "Greener" technology, e.g. devising devices that are less energy dependent, or designing software that takes into consideration energy consumption, trying to reduce as far as possible such consumption.

While these aspects are essential today due to the large availability of devices, another category of relevant work relates with the need to devise communication systems, and communication protocols, in a way that is energy-aware. In the context of pervasive wireless systems, the routing protocols being applied have not been devised having in mind energy awareness.

In this context, this field of work has explored metrics that can be applied to different families of multihop routing protocols and yet assist in a reduction of energy by providing better choice of paths to disseminate the information carried by nodes. The novel metrics have been validated in different protocols (OLSR; AODV), showing significant improvements in terms of network lifetime, while at the same time not jeopardizing the network operation in terms of throughput; packet loss; end-to-end delay. An IETF draft has been produced, explaining how to set the metrics in shortest-path derived approaches, as well as in new approaches, such as the RPL protocol.

Related work: