DELAR: A Device-Energy-Load Aware Relaying Framework for Heterogeneous Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

This paper addresses energy conservation, a fundamental issue of paramount importance in heterogeneous mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) consisting of powerful nodes (i.e., P-nodes) as well as normal nodes (i.e., B-nodes). By utilizing the inherent device heterogeneity, we propose a cross-layer designed Device-Energy-Load Aware Relaying framework, named DELAR, to achieve energy conservation from multiple facets, including power-aware routing, transmission scheduling and power control. In particular, we design a novel power-aware routing protocol that nicely incorporates device heterogeneity, nodal residual energy information and nodal load status to save energy. In addition, we develop a hybrid transmission scheduling scheme, which is a combination of reservation-based and contention-based medium access control schemes, to coordinate the transmissions. Moreover, the novel notion of "mini-routing" is introduced into the data link layer and an Asymmetric MAC (A-MAC) scheme is proposed to support the MAC-layer acknowledgements over unidirectional links caused by asymmetric transmission power levels between powerful nodes and normal nodes. Furthermore, we present a multi-packet transmission scheme to improve the end-to-end delay performance. Extensive simulations show that DELAR can indeed achieve energy saving while striking a good balance between energy efficiency and other network performance metrics.