A prioritized Battery-aware routing protocol for wireless ad hoc networks

It is a challenge area in the field of ad hoc networks to support prioritized routing for time sensitive applications, such as multi-media communications, IP telephony and interactive games. However the existing protocols did not consider the special battery discharging behavior of wireless devices. The limited power supply on wireless devices becomes the bottleneck for prioritized routing in ad hoc networks. Recent study in battery technology reveals that the behavior of battery discharging is more complex than we used to think. Battery powered wireless devices might waste a huge amount of energy if we do not carefully schedule and budget their discharging. In this paper we study the effect of battery behavior on prioritized routing in ad hoc networks. We provide a solution to measure the battery status with a simplified battery model. Based on this model we then present a prioritized battery-aware routing protocol (PBAR). The protocol is sensitive to the battery status of routing nodes and can avoid energy loss. We use the battery data from actual PDA, laptop and cellphone to evaluate the performance of our protocol. The results show that the PBAR performs well for prioritized service and can save a significant amount of energy compared to existing protocols. The network lifetime is also increased as well as its data throughput. As far as we know, this is the first work considering battery-awareness with an accurate analytical on-line computable battery model in ad hoc prioritized routing.