JOURNAL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING, VOLUME 9, ISSUE 2, OCTOBER 2011 25 © 2011 JCSE www.journalcse.co.uk Effect of Mobility on Energy Consumption in DSR and AODV Protocols in Mobile Ad hoc Networks Pinki Nayak, Rekha Agarwal, and Seema Verma Abstract—There are two types of wireless networks: infrastructured wireless network and infrastructureless wireless network, also called Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET). The MANETs are also suitable when network setup is difficult, costly and required to be done quickly within a short period. They are characterized by nodes which are moving continuously in a confined area. Energy conservation becomes very important in MANETs as most of the nodes are powered by a battery source which has li- mited energy reservoir and some times it also becomes very difficult to recharge or replace the battery of the nodes. Thus, life- time of the nodes show strong dependence on the lifetime of the batteries. In this paper, we analyze the relative energy con- sumption of two popular on-demand routing protocols in MANETs, AODV (Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector) and DSR (Dy- namic Source Route). Simulations are carried using NS2 Network Simulator under different mobility scenarios. It is shown that DSR performance is better under low mobility conditions. Index Terms— MANET, energy consumption, AODV, DSR. ——————————  —————————— 1 INTRODUCTION ith the advancement of wireless communica- tion technologies, small-size and high-performance computing and communication devices like com- mercial laptops and personal digital assistants are being used increasingly in daily life. A mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is composed of a group of mobile, wireless nodes which cooperate in forwarding packets in a multi- hop fashion without any centralized administration [1]. Significant examples of MANETs include establishing survivable dynamic communications for emergency /rescue operations, disaster relief efforts, and military networks. The network topology is highly dynamic in MANETs due to the movement of the nodes (mobility) which leads to frequent path breaks. This mobility affects the energy consumption of the nodes due to the high overheads that occurs in route discovery and route main- tenance phase in MANETs as compared to their wired counterparts. As each mobile node in a MANET performs the routing function for establishing communication among different nodes the “death” of even a few of the nodes due to energy exhaustion might cause disruption of service in the entire network. MANETs can also be understood as low mobility and high mobility networks. In low mobility networks, the movement of nodes is less frequent and slow like com- munication in a conference room, between a set of robots etc, whereas for high mobility networks the speed of the nodes is very high as in urban and road cars. The energy consumption of the nodes varies as the mobility changes. A number of power aware metrics are proposed and compared [8]-[10]. This paper attempts to study the effect of mobility and pause time on energy consumption of nodes in MANETs. The analysis of energy consumption for two popular on-demand routing protocols; Ad-hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV) and Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) is done. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. The brief description of AODV and DSR is provided in Section 2. A detailed description of the simulation environment fol- lows in Section 3 which contains details of the network topology, the mobility models and the traffic model used in the simulation. Section 4 gives a brief of the various simulation scenarios used. The simulation results are pro- vided in Section 5. Section 6 gives the conclusions. 2 MANET ROUTING PROTOCOL The existing routing protocol in MANETs can be clas- sified as table driven (also called proactive) and on- demand (also called reactive) schemes. In table-driven scheme, each node maintains the network topology in- formation in the form of routing tables by periodically exchanging routing information. On the other hand, on- demand schemes obtain the necessary routes when re- quired by a source node for transmitting data. For per- formance comparison, two most popular on-demand pro- tocols have been considered namely, DSR and AODV. ———————————————— Pinki Nayak is with Amity School of Engineering and Technology, New Delhi, INDIA. Currently, she is also a research student at Banasthali Uni- versity, Banasthali. Prof. Rekha Agarwal is the Director of Amity School of Engineering and Technology, New Delhi, INDIA. Dr. Seema Verma is working as Associate Professor at Banasthali Universi- ty, Banasthali, INDIA. W