Energy-awareness in Multihop Routing

Recent advances in wireless technology lead to the possibility to explore new Internet connectivity models derived from the willingness of the end-user to share some Internet services. These networking architectures, known as User-centric Networks, introduce the Internet end-user as an active network controller, as part of the devices used in user-centric networking are devices carried and controlled by Internet end-users. The devices that are owned by end-users are portable, have limited storage as well as are limited in terms of battery capacity. Due to this, user-centric networks exhibit topological variability as the network dynamics follow a human tendency related with the willingness to share resources. In such context it is relevant to consider that routing approaches require robustness in regards to the limited energy capability of the devices. This is the topic addressed in this chapter, namely, how to keep current multihop routing approaches and yet provide them with features that make the network lifetime increase, based on energy-awareness concepts. The chapter covers notions and concepts concerning multihop routing energy-awareness; shows how to develop and how to apply energy-awareness in the most popular multihop routing protocols, providing also input concerning performance evaluation, as well as realistic specification that can be used in operational scenarios, showing that the proposed approaches are fully backward compatible with current solutions.