Power consumption optimization and delay minimization in MANET

The performance of wireless networks under video traffic is subjected to two-fold constraints. Both power minimization and other QoS requirements such delay, delay jitter etc. need to be taken care of properly. Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) are more sensitive to these issues where each mobile device acts like a router and thus, routing delay adds significantly to overall endto- end delay. In this paper, we analyze the performance of the Warning Energy Aware Clusterhead/Virtual Base Station-On demand (WEAC/VBS-O) protocol, proposed earlier by one of the authors [1], in terms of average delay, multihop communication and power minimization aspects subject to video traffic. The H.263 standard is utilized to model video traffic in our simulation design. Primarily, we establish a single hop communication between nodes. It is then extended to multihop communication. However, we found that the protocol can support up to two hops for an acceptable network performance provided there is a significant number of nodes in the network. Hence, we modelled the same network with H.264 and showed that the hop count increases from two to five with better performance. We also took power minimization issue into consideration and minimize power consumption by making use of HCB model by applying it within the neighborhood of the node. Simulation results showed that this strategy does minimize power consumption and it did not degrade multihop communication improvement. With the idea that maximum power saving is achieved if the relaying node lies in the middle of source and destination node for HCB model [2]. Furthermore, we saw the effect of sudden demise of cluster heads in the Warning Energy Aware Cluster head (WEAC) protocol based on our previous work [3]. Subsequently, we compared the results when some clusterheads (CHs) have sudden death to the results when there is no switching of CH based on selected performance metrics. We found that there is little power loss if the relaying node is not in the middle of source and destination node. However, performance is seriously degraded on the introduction of sudden demise of CH during simulation as far as average end-to-end delay is concerned.