  Ad hoc networks are wireless mobile networks that can operate without
infrastructure and without centralized network management. Traditional
techniques of routing are not well adapted. Indeed, their lack of reactivity
with respect to the variability of network changes makes them difficult to use.
Moreover, conserving energy is a critical concern in the design of routing
protocols for ad hoc networks, because most mobile nodes operate with limited
battery capacity, and the energy depletion of a node affects not only the node
itself but also the overall network lifetime. In all proposed single-path
routing schemes a new path-discovery process is required once a path failure is
detected, and this process causes delay and wastage of node resources. A
multipath routing scheme is an alternative to maximize the network lifetime. In
this paper, we propose an energy-efficient multipath routing protocol, called
AOMR-LM (Ad hoc On-demand Multipath Routing with Lifetime Maximization), which
preserves the residual energy of nodes and balances the consumed energy to
increase the network lifetime. To achieve this goal, we used the residual
energy of nodes for calculating the node energy level. The multipath selection
mechanism uses this energy level to classify the paths. Two parameters are
analyzed: the energy threshold beta and the coefficient alpha. These parameters
are required to classify the nodes and to ensure the preservation of node
energy. Our protocol improves the performance of mobile ad hoc networks by
prolonging the lifetime of the network. This novel protocol has been compared
with other protocols: AOMDV and ZD-AOMDV. The protocol performance has been
evaluated in terms of network lifetime, energy consumption, and end-to-end
delay.
