Detours Save Energy in Mobile Wireless Networks

Autonomous robotic systems have been gaining the attention of research community in mobile ad hoc network since the past few years. While motion cost and communications cost constitute the primary energy consumers, each of them is investigated independently. By taking into account the power consumption of both entities, the overall energy efficiency of a system can be further improved. In this paper, the energy optimization problem of radio communication and motion is examined. We consider a hybrid wireless network that consists of a single autonomous mobile node and multiple relay nodes. The mobile node interacts with the relays within its vicinity by continuously communicating high-bandwidth data, e.g. triggered by a multimedia application like video surveillance. The goal is to find the best path such that the energy consumption for both mobility and communications is minimized. We introduce the Radio-Energy-Aware (REA) path computation strategy by utilizing node mobility. Given the starting point, the target point and the position of the relays, our simulation results show that the proposed strategy improves the energy efficiency of mobile node compared to the Motion-Energy-Aware (MEA) path constructed based only on the mobility cost.