Authors: Associate Professor Dr. Santosh G Kupendra
Abstract: In Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs), continuous and reliable communication heavily relies on the limited battery capacity of individual mobile nodes. A major drawback of standard reactive routing protocols, such as AODV, is their tendency to establish routes based solely on the shortest available path. This approach frequently leads to the over-utilization and rapid exhaustion of critical intermediate nodes, causing premature node death, abrupt link breakages, and severe network partitioning. To address this critical vulnerability, this paper introduces AODV-EXT-BP (AODV Extended with Battery Power metrics), an enhanced routing mechanism explicitly designed to optimize individual node longevity and ensure balanced energy distribution. The AODV-EXT-BP protocol fundamentally modifies the route discovery phase by integrating a dynamic battery power threshold. During the broadcast of Route Request (RREQ) packets, nodes with residual energy falling below a predefined critical threshold are actively bypassed in the route selection process, provided alternative paths exist. This allows vulnerable nodes to preserve their remaining lifespan for their own essential data transmissions rather than expending it on forwarding overhead for the wider network. Simulation experiments conducted under various mobility models and traffic loads demonstrate that AODV-EXT-BP significantly improves average node longevity. Compared to standard AODV, the proposed mechanism effectively delays the time of the first node death, reduces the variance of residual energy across the network topology, and maintains a high Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) without introducing prohibitive end-to-end delay.
