Traffic Based Energy Consumption Analysis of AOMDV Protocol in a Mobile Ad Hoc Network

Multipath routing is a common variation of traditional routing protocols for effective balancing of load and to provide aggregated bandwidth and fault-tolerance. In a mobile ad hoc network, consumption of energy is a critical factor since wireless nodes are typically battery-limited. The use of multipath schemes could exploit multiple disjoint routes between any pair of nodes which could lead to variation in energy consumption behavior. In the present investigation, a pre-defined MANET topology was created and the impact of traffic flow on energy consumption of AOMDV was analyzed in comparison with AODV. The performance metrics such as throughput, number of packets lost and end-to-end delay was also measured. The NS-2 simulation results showed that AOMDV could perform better at lower workloads. Apart from that, end-to-end delay is a major concern with multipath routing.