This paper presents a new routing approach to extend the effective lifetime of mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) considering both residual battery energy of the participating nodes and routing cost. As the nodes in ad hoc networks are limited in power, a power failure occurs if a node has insufficient remaining energy to send, receive or forward a message. So, it is important to minimize the energy expenditure as well as to balance the remaining battery power among the nodes. Cost effective routing algorithms attempt to minimize the total power needed to transmit a packet which causes a large number of nodes to loose energy quickly and die. On the other hand, lifetime prediction based routing algorithms try to balance the remaining energies among the nodes in the networks and ignore the transmission cost. These approaches extend the lifetime of first few individual nodes. But as nodes spend more energy for packet transfer, power failures occurs within short interval resulting more number of total dead node earlier. This reduces the effective lifetime of the network, as at this stage successful communication is not possible due to the lack of forwarding node. The proposed method keeps the transmission power in modest range and at the same time tries to reduce the variance of the residual energy of the nodes more effectively to obtain the highest useful lifetime of the networks in the long run. Nonetheless, movement of nodes frequently creates network topology changes via link breaks and link creation and thus effects on the stability of the network. So, the pattern of the node movement is also incorporated in our route selection procedure.

We propose LPDD (Lifetime Prediction Directed Diffusion), a novel energy-aware routing protocol for sensor networks that aims at increasing network survivability without a significant increase in latency. The key concept behind the protocol is the adaptive selection of routes by predicting the battery lifetime of the minimum energy nodes along the routes.