Energy-Efficient Optimization of AODV Routing Protocol for High-Density MANETs using Adaptive Control Packet Mechanism
High-density Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) often face poor performance because of too many control packets causing broadcast storms. Recent studies improve energy use in smaller networks (up to 100 nodes), but they ignore the high routing overhead in very dense networks. This paper proposes the Energy-Efficient Adaptive On-Demand Distance Vector (EE-AODV) protocol to reduce extra Route Request (RREQ) packets based on local node density. The proposed EE-AODV protocol was tested against standard AODV and DSR using the NS-2 simulator with up to 250 nodes in a 500m x 500m area. Results show that at 250 nodes, EE-AODV keeps the Normalized Routing Load (NRL) low at 0.8120, while AODV's NRL reaches 2.0005. By reducing channel traffic, EE-AODV maintains a strong Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) of 73.10% and lowers average energy use to 11.24 J per node. This demonstrates that reducing control packets is an effective solution for high-density MANET environments to maintain network stability.