Vol.:(0123456789) Wireless Personal Communications https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-020-07242-0 1 3 Lifetime Estimation and Measurement for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks Mousami Vanjale 1,2  · Janardan S. Chitode 1  · Shilpa P. Gaikwad 1 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020 Abstract Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANET) is a popular choice for “wireless communication net- work” due to ease of deployment. Nodes in MANET are battery operated, movable, and compact. They can sense, manipulate and communicate data wirelessly. Limited battery power of the nodes is one of the major constraints of MANET. This paper proposes a net- work lifetime model that considers residual energy and actual discharge rate of the bat- tery along with the energy consumption in diferent modes like transmit, receive, sleep, idle, active and processing while calculating the lifetime. A circuit implementation of node with Arduino Mega 2560, ZigBee transceiver, 2100 mAh NiMH rechargeable battery was done to compare lifetime with conventional dynamic source routing (DSR) and modifed Least Max Dynamic Source Routing (LMDSR) algorithms. The DSR algorithm always selects the shortest path between source and destination nodes. But the LMDSR algorithm also considers the residual battery levels of the nodes to avoid overuse of the node(s) with low battery. This will prevent the early exhaustion of node(s) which may be the reason for reduced network lifetime. The result analysis shows that the implementation of LMDSR algorithm improves the network lifetime on an average by 31% and reduces the energy con- sumption by 21% with a slight decrease in throughput. Keywords Mobile ad-hoc network · Dynamic source routing · Residual battery level · Least max dynamic source routing · Peukert’s constant · Network lifetime 1 Introduction Traditional MANET routing algorithm always selects the shortest path between a source and a destination. But it is necessary to consider the specifc constraints like limited band- width and battery power during the process of routing. Nodes in MANETs are mobile and can move out of the range of the other nodes in the network at any time instant. This will divide the network and may require re-establishing the route between the source and * Mousami Vanjale mousami.vanjale@aissmsioit.org 1 Department of Electronics, BV (DU) College of Engineering, Pune, Maharashtra, India 2 Department of E & TC Engineering, AISSMS’s Institute of Information Technology, Pune, Maharashtra, India