WRE‐OLSR, a new scheme for enhancing the lifetime within ad hoc and wireless sensor networks

Summary Within ad hoc and wireless sensor networks, communications are accomplished in dynamic environments with a random movement of mobile devices. Thus, routing protocols over these networks are an important concern to offer efficient network scalability, manage topology information, and prolong the network lifetime. Optimized link state routing (OLSR) is one of those routing protocols implemented in ad hoc and wireless sensor networks. Because of its proactive technique, routes between two nodes are established in a very short time, but it can spend a lot of resources for selecting the multipoint relays (MPRs: nodes responsible for routing data) and exchanging topology control information. Thus, nodes playing for a long time a role of MPR within networks implementing such protocol can rapidly exhaust their batteries, which create route failures and affect the network lifetime. Our main approach relies on analyzing this concern by introducing a new criterion that implements a combination between the residual energy of a node and its reachability in order to determine the optimal number of MPRs and sustain the network lifetime. Simulations performed illustrate obviously that our approach is more significant compared with the basic heuristic used by original OLSR to compute the MPR set of a node. In this paper, we present a new scheme for enhancing the lifetime of mobile ad hoc and sensor wireless networks using optimized link state routing (OLSR) as routing protocol. In such networks, the energy constraint is one of the parameters to take into account for measuring the QoS, knowing that nodes are battery‐powered and highly mobile. Simulations results gained during our work demonstrate obviously that our new protocol version called WRE‐OLSR outperforms the QoS of mobile ad hoc and sensor wireless networks in terms of lifetime and average end‐to‐end delay.