Mobility- and Energy-Aware Next-Hop Selection for Reliable Routing in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks: A Reproducible Simulation Study
Keywords:
AODV, Link expiration time, MANET, Residual battery, Route maintenanceAbstract
Background: Routes in mobile ad hoc networks break because nodes move, and they degrade because relays exhaust their batteries or become congested. Hop-count routing, as used by the Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) protocol, ignores all three effects.
Objectives: This study proposes Mobility-, Energy-, and Queue-aware Routing (MEQ-R) and quantifies its benefits and costs against established alternatives.
Methodology: MEQ-R assigns each link a cost that combines predicted link-expiration time, the residual-energy ratio, queue occupancy of the next hop, and hop count, and it rebuilds a route preemptively when its weakest link is about to expire. It was compared with minimum-hop routing, minimum battery-cost routing, and a stability-based scheme in a packet-level simulator with random-waypoint mobility, a first-order energy model, and a fluid queue model, over 1,100 paired runs that varied speed, node count, offered load, and metric weights.
Results: In the reference scenario of 50 nodes moving at up to 10 m/s, MEQ-R raised the packet delivery ratio from 95.9% to 98.7% (paired Wilcoxon p below 0.0001), reduced route failures by 83% and lowered routing overhead by 20% relative to minimum-hop routing, at a cost of 6% more energy per delivered packet. Route failures fell by 45–95 % in every scenario, and the overhead reduction reached 51% in dense networks. The energy term reduced relaying through depleted nodes and the queue term reduced overflow losses under heavy load. MEQ-R gave no benefit in near-static or partitioned networks.
Conclusions: Link-lifetime prediction with pre-emptive maintenance is the key mechanism for reliable routing under mobility.
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