EC-PPRA: An Energy Efficient Routing Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Abstract—A promising energy conserving technique for the Ad hoc network must maintain effective packet forwarding capacity when turning off the network interface for idle nodes to reduce power consumption. This paper incorporates the energy conserving technique with the Ant Colony routing protocol and proposes a new EC-PPRA routing algorithm. We use the pheromone mechanism to make routing decision while turning off the network interface of idle nodes adaptively to save energy. Based on the emulation of pheromone trail and biological behaviors of ants, EC-PPRA can control the pheromone trail concentration by changing the forwarding behavior of ant packets to reserve energy and maintain the packet forwarding capability at the same time. We perform extensive simulations to demonstrate the superiority of EC-PPRA over the existing protocols, such as PPRA, AODV. We show that EC-PPRA can significantly prolong the network lifetime by improving the average node residual energy and the number of live nodes.