Investigating the Impact of Mobility and Traffic Loads on Energy Consumption of MANETs

In Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs), the energy allocated per node are used for both data transmission and broadcasting control packets. Therefore the network lifetime depends on the nodes’ battery lifetime. The lifetime of the network will be reduced significantly if mobility and traffic loads increase in each node as more power is utilized than expected. This paper investigates the energy consumption of mobile nodes for different speeds and traffic loads. We observed that the higher the mobility of nodes, the more the energy it consumes. In particular, a node spends up to 95%of its energy when moving at the speed of 20m/s. In addition, the power consumption of a node increases when the traffic load on the network grow because nodes will need more power for processing.