Energy efficient expanding ring search for route discovery in MANETs

A mobile ad-hoc network is a self-configuring network of user devices that are connected by wireless links in infrastructure-less situation. These kinds of networks have many challenges such as unreliable links, lack of scalability, limited resources, etc. and energy consumption is a major issue in designing network protocols because of battery constraints. In on-demand multi-hop routing protocols e.g. AODV and DSR, the route discovery process uses Expanding Ring Search heuristic algorithm for reducing broadcast overhead and saving energy consumption. However, based on our observation we see that there are still some redundant broadcasts of this process that causes overhead, wasted energy, and increased collisions in the network. Here we propose a method which solves the redundant broadcasts of route discovery based on expanding ring search. The performance evaluation results show that by applying the proposed scheme, we can reduce the overhead of expanding ring search based route discovery up to about 20%, and therefore the total energy consumption of AODV is decreased by 15%.