Evaluation of Energy Consumption of Reactive and Proactive Routing Protocols in MANET

International Journal of Computer Networks & Communications (IJCNC) Vol.9, No.2, March 2017
DOI: 10.5121/ijcnc.2017.9203 29
EVALUATION OF ENERGY CONSUMPTION OF
REACTIVE AND PROACTIVE ROUTING PROTOCOLS
IN MANET
Mohamad T. Sultan and Salim M. Zaki
Department of Computer Science, Cihan University, Erbil, Iraq
ABSTRACT
Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a distributed, infrastructure-less and decentralized network. A routing
protocol in MANET is used to find routes between mobile nodes to facilitate communication within the
network. Numerous routing protocols have been proposed for MANET. Those routing protocols are
designed to adaptively accommodate for dynamic unpredictable changes in network's topology. The mobile
nodes in MANET are often powered by limited batteries and network lifetime relies heavily on the energy
consumption of nodes. In consequence, the lack of a mobile node can lead to network partitioning. In this
paper we analyse, evaluate and measure the energy efficiency of three prominent MANET routing protocols
namely DSR, AODV and OLSR in addition to modified protocols. These routing protocols follow the
reactive and the proactive routing schemes. A discussion and comparison highlighting their particular
merits and drawbacks are also presented. Evaluation study and simulations are performed using NS-2 and
its accompanying tools for analysis and investigation of results.
KEYWORDS
MANETs, Energy-aware, Routing protocols, Ad-hoc networks, power consumption.
1. INTRODUCTION
The advent of wireless mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) has offered an efficient and most
importantly cost effective technique to make use of the availability of mobile hosts when no fixed
infrastructure is provided. In MANET, the mobile nodes can easily communicate with each other
while they are freely moving around in different directions. An ad-hoc network relies entirely on
nodes cooperation for forwarding information from data sources to intended destination nodes.
Some examples of mobile nodes in an ad-hoc network are laptop computers, smart phones and
personal digital assistants that interact directly with each other [1][16].There are many advantages
of such an ad-hoc network which include fast deployment, robustness, efficiency, and inherent
support for mobility.
The mobile nodes in MANET can be arbitrarily positioned and are free to travel randomly at any
particular time, thus allowing network topology and connections between mobile nodes to change
rapidly. This makes routing in MANET a challenge. Routing protocols helps MANET to perform
its function of routing of the data packets from the source to the intended destination in the
network. Because of the occurrence of mobility, the routing information will have to be changed
to reflect changes in link connectivity [1][2].
Researchers have become more interested on how to secure MANETs. They have suggested
several methods to prevent or reduce the risk of attacks on the mobile ad-hoc networks by using

30
access control key management and trust models mechanisms [1][2].Energy consumption is a
very critical issue in MANET since mobile nodes are often powered by limited battery resources.
Thus, network lifetime relies heavily on the energy consumption of nodes. Saving energy is,
therefore, critical in order to prolong the lifetime of the network. Figure 1 illustrates the
architecture of the Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET).
The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews the related work. Section 3 briefly describes
the studied routing protocols. Section 4 gives the details of simulation environment and energy
model. It also describes the implementation of the routing protocols and the simulation setup used
in this research. The Simulation results are shown in section 5. Finally section 6 describes our
conclusion and future scope.
Figure 1. MANET architecture
2. RELATED WORK
This section summarizes some of the work related to MANET routing protocols in terms of
energy consumption done by several researchers. The authors in [3] have proposed a loop-free
energy conserving scheme which tries to decrease routing and storage overhead to provide
optimization of resources use in large scale networks. The researchers in [4] have found reactive
protocols such as DSR; AODV behaved more efficient than DSDV and showed superior
performance than TORA. In [5] the authors have investigated AODV based algorithm with less
energy consumption during route founding by establishing routes that are lower congested than
the others. The traditional routing algorithms lack energy awareness of the nodes in the network
[17].
The authors in [20] have compared the energy consumption of various protocols under CBR
traffic. The authors in [21] have compared two reactive protocols under ON/OFF source traffic.
They have selected packet delivery ratio, normalized routing overhead and average delay as the
performance parameters. Jaun Carlos Cano et. al. [22] have developed number of such protocols
and analyzed them under Constant Bit Rate (CBR) traffic. D. Nitnawale et. al. [23] have
presented a paper on comparison of various protocols under Pareto traffic. An analysis of these
studies shows that their shared goal is to enhance the energy consumption of routing protocols.
However, the parameters taken into consideration by each of them are different. In the current
paper, we have evaluates and analyzed the energy consumption of three prominent MANET
routing protocols (AODV, OLSR and DSR) under constant bit rate CBR traffic in regards to

31
different number of mobile nodes. Total energy consumed by each node throughout transmission
and reception operation has been evaluated as the function of number of nodes in the network.
3. MANET ROUTING PROTOCOLS
Several routing protocols for ad-hoc networks have been proposed. The two main basic roles of
MANET routing protocols are the selection of path and delivering data packets accurately to the
right target. MANET routing protocols can be classified into three different categories which are
table-driven routing protocols (proactive), on-demand routing protocols (reactive) and hybrid
routing protocols [6][15]. In the following sub-sections, the proactive and the reactive routing
approaches will be discussed.
3.1 Table-Driven Routing Protocols (Proactive)
The table-driven routing protocols always try to keep consistent up to date routing data for every
node in the network. These protocols attempt to maintain accurate routing information of the
complete network at all times. Every node in the network keeps the routing information by
maintaining one or more routing tables. The nodes usually try to revitalize the information about
the target nodes by updating the routing tables. The routing protocol adapts to the sudden changes
in topology by broadcasting network updates whenever changes occur [6]. In the following
section an explanation of OLSR routing protocol will be presented.
3.1.1 Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR)
In OLSR all nodes have routing table for keeping the routing information to every other node in
the network to provide a route to the destination immediately when desired [7]. In OLSR routing
protocol, one of the most essential key concepts used is the use of multipoint relays (MPRs). The
main purpose of the MPRs is to forward the broadcast messages in the network. The traditional
link state protocol broadcast mechanism is not used in OLSR. This is because in OLSR only
partial link state information is distributed where the content of the broadcast packets is only
about MPRs rather than all the detailed link state information [8].
The mobile nodes select the MPRs amidst their surrounding neighbors and then rebroadcast only
those messages that are received from nodes who selected it as an MPR. OLSR mainly uses two
kinds of control messages. The first one is the periodic HELLO messages while the second type is
the Topology Control (TC) messages. The HELLO messages are used for discovering the
information about the link status or in other words it carries out the task of neighbor detecting.
The second type, which is the Topology Control (TC) messages are used for the purpose of
information declaration about the multipoint relay. OLSR protocol is mainly appropriate for large
and dense networks for the reason that the technique of multipoint relays performs well in this
environment [7][8]. Figure 2 below shows MPR selection in OLSR routing protocol.
3.1.2 ENERGY EFFICIENT OLSR ROUTING PROTOCOL (EE-OLSR)
uses multipoint relays (MPRs) to elect nodes for forwarding messages the protocol uses energy
aware mechanism called willingness which is a variable representing the availability of a node to
act as a MPR for surrounding nodes. The idea behind this method is to reduce the messages
overhead that leads to reduction in energy consumption. The main goal of EE-OLSR is to prolong
the lifetime of the ad hoc network by extending lifetime of nodes’ batteries. As shown in
simulation results, EE-OLSR protocol overtakes OLSR protocol in average nodes lifetime and
preserving the normalized control overhead [18].

32
Figure 2. Multipoint relays in OLSR routing protocol
3.2 On-Demand Routing Protocols (Reactive)
On-demand protocols generate routes only when there is a request to send data. This approach is
totally different than that of table-driven routing. Routing information about the mobile nodes is
not maintained by protocols instead the route request is initiated only when needed. When the
source nodes need to start a route to the target, at this time the route is being initiated to serve the
request of the source nodes [6][9].
3.2.1 Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV)
AODV is developed based on the DSDV routing algorithm [6][10]. It is categorized as a pure
reactive routing protocol scheme. When there is a route required in the network, AODV will
execute route discovery process to find the route to the desired destination. As soon as a route is
generated in the network, it is maintained as long as it is still needed using a route maintenance
process. Each mobile node keeps the routes that have been discovered in its routing table.
However a routing table entry expires if it is no longer being used or has exceeded the expiration
period which has been pre-identified earlier. AODV has three essential messages which are the
Route Request (RREQ), Route Reply (RREP), and Route Error (RERR) [6]. The RREQ message
contains information such as the IP address of the source and destination nodes, current sequence
number, broadcast ID and latest sequence number for the destination known to the source node.
In response to the request message the mobile nodes send back RREP message to the source
node. This reply message contains the information that the source node needs with the valid route.
However, when there is a problem in the network another procedure is used which is the RERR
message. This message holds a list of all of the unreachable destinations in the network. AODV is
a reactive on-demand routing protocol, despite the fact that it still employs some characteristics of
the table-driven routing approach. AODV is a good choice for routing in the case when the
network is dynamically changing. This protocol combines the motivating features of DSR and
DSDV routing in a way that it employs the idea of route discovery and route maintenance like
DSR routing protocol and in the same time it makes use of the sequence numbers and
transmitting of periodic hello messages from DSDV. The use of destination sequence numbers
guarantees loop-free routes and help to detect available fresh routes which allow the source nodes
to discover new routes every time[11].

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3.2.2 Energy aware routing (EAR)
This protocol is based on AODV it aims to make the network energy aware. Where energy
efficient design of the protocol is controlled through changing the transmission range of the
nodes. Adjustable transmission range affects the battery power for each packet at each node,
accordingly affects energy consumption of the ad hoc network. The higher transmission range the
less number of hops to destination node, the less transmission range the high number of
forwarders to destination node. The high transmission affects the power negatively and leads to
high power consumption. EAR utilizes Route Discovery phase when node communication with
neighbours. Once the route is determined, every node controls the transmission range as per the
distance between source and destination node, therefore the best energy is utilized for packet
transmission. The simulation results show EAR outperforms AODV in terms of network time and
energy consumption [17].
3.2.3 Dynamic Source Routing (DSR)
DSR is an independent routing protocol which can be described as a completely self-configuring
self-organizing routing protocol [12]. To improve the discovery process in the network, routes
caches are kept at the mobile nodes and those caches are frequently updated. DSR involves no
periodic data packets within the network of any kind at any level. For instance, there is no
periodic routing advertisement, neighbor detection or link status sensing packets to be used in
DSR, and it does not depend on any underlying protocol for those tasks. DSR has two core
mechanisms which are route discovery and route maintenance [13]. Once any mobile node within
the network desires to send a data message to a particular destination, it initially broadcasts a
route request (RREQ) packet. The neighbor and surrounding nodes which lay in the range of
transmission of the source node receive that RREQ packet and add their own address to it and
they rebroadcast it again in the network. If the discovery procedure is successful, the source
initiator obtains a response data packet that shows the series of nodes over which the destination
could be reached. The route request packet therefore has a record field accumulating a list of
nodes visited for the duration of propagation of the query in the network. DSR routing protocol
has many benefits. For instance, it does not employ periodic route advertisement which leads to
saving in network bandwidth as well as reduction in power consumption. DSR has a faster route
recovery than many other reactive protocols as well. However, the limitation of this protocol is
that the benefit of caching routes for large networks and higher mobility may become not that
useful [12][14].
3.2.4 Multipath and energy-aware on demand source routing (MEA-DSR)
This protocol is based on DSR. MEA-DSR, minimizes the number of discovered paths that a
destination node provides to a source node to two paths only. The criteria of choosing primary
route in MEA-DSR is conditioned by two features; first, the remaining energy of nodes belonging
to the path; second, the total transmission power essential to transmit data on the path. This
feature is corresponding to that of number of hops in the route if we assume that nodes transmit
with full power. Multiple modifications done on messages of DSR to make MEA-DSR energy
aware and select reliable paths. The simulation results show better performance of MEA-DSR
compared to DSR in consumed energy [19].
4. SIMULATION ENVIRONMENT
This section provides the details of the simulation environment used in this paper. The entire
simulation work is conducted and implemented on a Linux (Ubuntu distribution) operating
system. The simulation is done with the help of NS-2 simulator. NS-2 deals efficiently with

34
network's core components and it provides the complete vision of the network construction this
includes routing protocols, transport layer protocols, interface queues, as well as link layer
components. The simulation environment consists of four different numbers of nodes which are
10, 20, 30 and 50 mobile nodes. Nodes are being generated randomly at random position and
Constant Bit Rate (CBR) traffic generators will be used as sources to run the simulation. For this
research study the selected mobility model is the Random Waypoint Mobility Model which is one
of the most widely used mobility models among the research community. The selected
parameters are varied using setdest command in NS-2.
The simulation parameters considered for the performance evaluation of MANET routing
protocols are shown in Table 1.
Table 1. Simulation Parameters
Simulation parameters
Parameters values
Platform Linux (Ubuntu) 10.04
Simulation Tool Network Simulator 2 (NS-2)
Routing Protocols AODV, DSR and OLSR
Pause Time 10 sec.
Experiment Duration 130 sec
Number of Nodes 10, 20, 30, 50
Traffic Model CBR (Constant Bit Rate)
Packet Size 512 bytes
Area 500m X 500m
Maximum Speed 20 m/s
Mobility Model Random Waypoint
MAC Layer Protocol IEEE 802.11b
Antenna Type Antenna/OmniAntenna
4.1 Energy Evaluation Model
We have used similar energy model as specified by Marzoni and Cano [4]. Energy is converted in
joules by multiplying power with time. The total energy consumed by each node is calculated as
sum of transmitted and received energy for all control packets. The following equations are used
to calculate energy required in joules to transmit and receive the packets of given size in joules.
Transmitted Energy:
Tx Energy = (Tx Power X Packet Size) / 2×106
(1)
Receiving Energy:
Rx Energy = (Rx Power X Packet Size) / 2×106
(2)
The table below show the energy model and energy parameters used in this study.

35
Table 2. Energy Model Parameters
Parameters for Energy Model
Parameters values
Initial Energy 100 Joule
Radio Frequency 281.8mW
Receiving Power 1.1w
Transmission Power 1.65w
Transition Power 0.6w
Sleep Power 0.001w
Transition Time 0.005s
5. SIMULATION RESULTS AND ANALYSIS
The simulation results of each network scenario that presents the performance of the routing
protocols with respect to energy consumption are explained in this section. The node density of
the simulation network was varied to determine the performance impact of the three routing
protocols.
Figure. 3 Energy consumption Versus No. of Nodes
Figure 3 shows the total energy consumed (Joules) by all the nodes involved in transmitting and
receiving the control packets by varying the number of mobile nodes in the network. The node
density is increased from 10 to 50 nodes within the same network size as each simulation run is
performed.
All the routing protocols show an increase in the consumed energy as the number of the mobile
nodes increase and the network size become bigger. This is because the mobile nodes in the
network have to process all the routing packets. As such, the total power consumption of the
network will increase. According to Figure 3, the consumed energy of DSR and AODV and
OLSR form 10 nodes to 20 nodes are quite similar; but a considerable difference of energy
consumption can be noticed as the network size become larger until it reaches to 50 mobile nodes.
The performance of the on-demand routing protocol AODV in terms of the energy consumption

36
is quite poor compared to the other on-demand protocol DSR, and this could be mainly due to the
increase in the maintenance process as the number of nodes increase. Although DSR and AODV
have the same on-demand behavior but they are still have a bit different routing mechanisms.
That’s why AODV has superior energy consumption as compared to DSR where maintenance
process of AODV can be the main reason of this increase.
The proactive routing protocol OLSR has an average performance compared to the other
protocols. From the figure above it can be seen that the energy consumption of both DSR and
OLSR routing protocols increases in quite the same pattern with increasing number of nodes
below 30; but the gap in energy consumption only start to occur half way through the simulation
and start to become higher after 30 mobile nodes. The short comings of this aspect of OLSR are
caused by the large number of overheads generated between the nodes within a group. However,
OLSR did not perform too badly and has consistently better results than AODV. At higher
density nodes, DSR routing protocol performs efficiently in consuming less overall system energy
and this is because of DSR as an on-demand protocol doesn't have to maintain route to the target
if there is no data to be send. That’s why DSR seems to have better performance compared to its
counterparts.
6. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we addressed the issues of energy efficient routing in MANET. Mobile nodes in
MANET rely on batteries, consequently efficient utilization of battery energy becomes significant
and it affects the increase the lifetime of the mobile network. This paper is mainly focused on
several routing algorithms proposed for mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). The aim of this
research work was to evaluate the performance of three prominent MANET routing schemes
which are AODV, DSR and OLSR with regard to energy consumption. The purpose of the work
is to comprehend the impact of having more nodes within a fixed map of operation on the
network’s energy consumed. In general, the on-demand AODV protocol consumed more energy
within the network at the beginning of the simulation and it lasted until the end of the simulation.
As mentioned earlier AODV routing protocol has shown higher degree of consumed energy than
the DSR and OLSR routing in higher density network operation. While DSR uses source routing
with longer header, AODV uses hop-by-hop scheme which may not help in consuming lower
energy values.
It observed generally that increasing number of nodes results in increasing energy consumption in
all routing protocols due to routing control packets. It can be noticed of DSR as being more
energy efficient than AODV and OLSR in this research and it emerges as a good candidate in
conserving the system energy. This work may generally be concluded by addressing the issue of
routing in MANETs which is each routing protocol has certain benefits and weaknesses, and is
well suited for certain conditions. Therefore choosing an appropriate routing protocol for
MANET would produce the highest routing performance in the network.
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