Performance evaluation of power-aware routing algorithms in personal networks

Abstract

Abstract¿Personal Networks (PN) is a concept in the area of
modern communication networks in which devices belonging to
a person cooperate to offer services to the person regardless of
their geographical locations. A PN may consist of several adhoc
sub-networks (or clusters) which are interconnected through
infrastructure networks such as the Internet. Failure of personal
devices due to battery shortage is one of the main threads
for service availability in PNs. Power-aware routing (PAR) has
been proposed as an effective scheme to prolong the lifetime of
battery-operated nodes in wireless ad-hoc networks. This scheme,
however, could be utilized in PNs as well, since a PN cluster can
be modeled as a wireless ad-hoc network. Aiming at prolonging
the lifetime of nodes in PNs, in this paper we propose a PAR
algorithm for PNs and we evaluate and compare its performance
with the performance of other PAR algorithms proposed so-far
for wireless ad-hoc networks. We analyze the effect of node
density, routing overhead, heterogeneity of PN nodes in terms
of their power supplies, and communication pattern within PN
clusters on the performance of the PAR algorithms. Taking into
account various parameters, we show that in a PN environment,
our proposed scheme can profoundly extend the lifetime of PN
nodes compared to the other algorithms. We also show that
there can be an optimal value for route refresh interval, as a
parameter which affects the generated routing overhead, and the
node density of PN clusters, in such a way that the network
lifetime is maximized.