Sustainable Multipath Routing for Improving Cross-Layer Performance in MANET Using an Energy Centric Tunicate Swarm Algorithm

Generally, battery power is a valuable resource for mobile devices in a Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET). Therefore, energy efficiency and network lifetime should be taken into account when developing control strategies. However, designing an energy-efficient routing mechanism necessitates consideration of many nodes from many layers, such as remaining energy, overall traffic load, and channel assumptions. The traditional layered strategy is unsuccessful in dealing with power-related issues that might affect all layers of the stack. In this paper, the Energy Centric Tunicate Swarm Algorithm (ECTSA) is proposed to perform the cross-layer routing over MANET. The fitness metrics considered in the ECTSA to improve the cross-layer routing are residual energy, communication cost, Data Success Rate (DSR), and mobility. Additionally, an Adaptive Competition Window (ACW) adjustment is used for minimizing the energy consumption caused by the contentions. The performance of the proposed ECTSA is analyzed by means of energy consumption, Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), End-to-End Delay (EED), and routing overhead. Next, the existing techniques, namely, CEELBRP and EECRP-PSO, are used to evaluate the efficiency of the ECTSA method. The energy consumption of the ECTSA is 7.1 joules and prolongs the network lifetime up to 1603 s for 50 nodes, which is better when compared to the existing CEELBRP and EECRP-PSO techniques.