A Survey of Power-Aware Routing Techniques for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

Abstract

Wireless technology presents intelligent solutions and offers high networking flexibility. Through wireless sensor networks, users can access their information remotely, anytime, and anywhere. In Mobile Ad-hoc Wireless Networks (MANETs), mobile nodes have limited energy and resources. Moreover, nodes able to leave or join the network liberally, which increases network complexity and design challenges. Consequently, several ad-hoc routing protocols have been evolved to conserve energy, amend network performance, and address the encountered design challenges. The literature presents a comprehensive variety of techniques and models that have been proposed for efficient, power-aware, MANETs. In this paper, we propose a new taxonomy that categorizes the most common MANET routing approaches published in the literature. The paper presents an in-depth comparative analysis of power-aware techniques to help researchers better understand the current research directions in MANET power-aware routing. The presented analysis highlights the advantages and disadvantages of each routing technique and discusses the impact of the findings on network design options.