Effect of Mobility and Traffic Models on the Energy Consumption in MANET Routing Protocols

A Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a group of mobile nodes that can be set up randomly and formed without the need of any existing network infrastructure or centralized administration. In this network the mobile devices are dependent on battery power, it is important to minimize their energy consumption. Also storage capacity and power are severely limited. In situations such as emergency rescue, military actions, and scientific field missions, energy conservation plays an even more important role which is critical to the success of the tasks performed by the network. Therefore, energy conservation should be considered carefully when designing or evaluating ad hoc routing protocols. In this paper we concentrated on the energy consumption issues of existing routing protocols in MANET under various mobility models and whose connections communicate in a particular traffic model (CBR, Exponential, and Pareto). This paper describes a performance comparison of the AODV, DSR and DSDV routing protocols in term of energy consumed due to packet type (routing/MAC) during transmission and reception of control packets. The mobility models used in this work are Random Waypoint, Manhattan Grid and Reference Point Group. Simulations have been carried out using NS-2 and its associated tools for animation and analysis of results.