The proliferation of low-power analog and digital electronics has created huge opportunities for the field of wireless computing. It is now possible to deploy hundreds of devices of low computation, communication and battery power. They can create ad hoc networks and be used as distributed sensors to monitor large geographical areas, as communication enables for field operations, or as grids of computation. These applications require great care in the utilization of power. The power level is provided by batteries and thus it is finite.
Every message sent and every computation performed drains the battery.
So the power should be considered as a metric in the design of the routing algorithm. The goal is to optimize the lifetime of the network. To ensure scalability, we introduce a second online algorithm for power-aware routing. This hierarchical algorithm is called zone-based routing. Our experiments show that its performance is very good.