Edinburgh Napier University

  In the vast majority of ad-hoc routing protocols, the hop-counting mechanisms for identifying the optimal route are dominant. However, this approach oversimplifies such a complex decision by ignoring the fact that participating devices may have considerably unequal performance characteristics and current utilisation status. Accordingly, it is possible for an optimal route to be composed of devices with high utilisation status, or, low battery reserves, which results in an overall unreliable route. This research work tackles this by identifying the best metrics that can describe any route within a graph, in terms of overall throughput, reliability, and minimum energy consumption. Simulations were carried out by varying critical factors of mobile devices such as battery reserves, memory and CPU utilisation, and results recorded the effect that this has on the device's overall routing metric. This paper also presents the threshold values, which turn the device from routing-capable to routing-incapable state.