## 4 Results
### Protocol Evaluation  
We now discuss the results that were obtained for the evaluation of the proposed EA-AODV protocol, described in Section 3.3. The protocol performance will be analyzed using different configurations, including the one that provides a power minimization behavior. Although legacy protocols that pursue minimizing transmitted power may have different signaling procedures, the obtained routes would be the same. In such a case, assuming that the user traffic is much higher than the signaling overhead, the results obtained with EA-AODV with minimum power configuration would be similar to the ones yielded by legacy solutions. On the other hand, we discard comparing EA-AODV with min-hop solutions (i.e., legacy AODV), since they do not seek minimizing the transmitted power, and the comparison would therefore be unfair. We have carried out extensive simulations with the NS-3 [32] simulation framework, where the protocol has been implemented and integrated. We consider static scenarios comprising nodes equipped with 802.11 g wireless technology, with a maximum transmission power of 16 dBm. The protocol itself does not strictly define the cost computation procedure, but it provides a framework to incorporate a dynamic cost adaptation scheme, including the mechanisms to appropriately propagate the corresponding changes. In particular, two different costs have been implemented within the protocol, based on the abstract ones that were previously used in Section 3.2. We have used the same naming as for the EMF-aware algorithm, and \(\mathcal{P}\) corresponds to the transmission power that is required to reach the next hop, while \(\mathcal{K}\) accounts for the accumulated exposure. Differently to the algorithm evaluation, the costs in the protocol are calculated using actual power values. During the simulations, \(\mathcal{P}\) is established as the transmission power in mW, within the range \([1,40]\), required to reach the next hop. On the other hand, \(\mathcal{K}\) is assessed every \(T\) seconds, by monitoring the total transmission power during the last slot. In order to be able to study the impact of assigning a different weight to either of the two costs, \(\mathcal{K}\) is scaled by a factor of \(\omega\). We will afterwards analyze how it impacts the protocol performance. The computed values are used during the route discovery procedure, where each node updates the corresponding cost values of the ROUTE_DISC message (see Section 3.3.1), locally computing \(\mathcal{P}\) and \(\omega\cdot\mathcal{K}\). Eventually, the source selects the route with minimum cost, and updates it according to the information provided during the cost update procedure, as was described Section 3.3.2. As can be observed, the costs \(\mathcal{P}\) and \(\mathcal{K}\) in the protocol are particular definitions of the abstract ones that were used in Section 3.2. Furthermore, they both have a clear relationship with the theoretical framework presented in Section 3.1. Indeed, the exposure growing \(\bar{\sigma}^{\prime}_{k}\) of each node (measured in mW), as well as the overall one (pertaining to the whole network), can be minimized by reducing the transmission power, i.e., with \(\mathcal{P}\). On the other hand, \(\bar{\sigma}^{\prime\prime}_{k}\) (measured in mW/s), which modulates the pace at which the accumulated exposure varies, is considered by the latter cost component, \(\mathcal{K}\). In particular, nodes that have transmitted more power during the last slot (higher mW/s), are penalized in the route decision process,  
Figure 10: Average exposure reached at the end of a experiment. We represent the values yielded by the _EMFaware_ and _MinPower_ algorithms with bars and dotted line, respectively. and so the pace at which exposure accumulation varies is also taken into account by the proposed protocol. We have first studied the protocol behavior over a simple network, in order to analyze the impact of the \(\omega\) parameter. It is worth noting that the configuration with \(\omega=0\) yields a minimum power solution.