Energy in Ad-Hoc Networking for the PicoRadio

Daniel. D. Patel, M.S. 2000 (advisor: Jan Rabaey).

In this report, we have presented a look at the energy used for networking. The report stated that there are two primary costs for routing packets. The first cost comes from actually forwarding the bit to the final destination. The minimal cost is a function of how many hops were taken and the distance per hop. This cost function assumes that once algorithms and architectures have been fixed the function is dependent on only these two unknowns. Using this cost function we can minimize it and essentially find an optimal distance per hop to use. This distance per hop value suggests the optimal power level to transmit at to maximize power savings.

The second cost in networking comes from using resources to find the routes to take. The report looked at two different styles, proactive and reactive. Most ad-hoc routing protocols are some form of these two styles. We used DSDV to explore the characteristics of proactive protocols and AODV for reactive. We wrote models for these in OpNet and formulated equations for the amount of traffic generated through intuitive analysis verified by simulation. Some results came from optimized variants of the protocols whose source is listed in the appendix.