Abstract
We investigate the energy-time efficiency of the use of chase packets for a number of recently developed energy or time efficient protocols based on the expanding ring search (ERS) for MANETs, namely LB, oDTC, cBERS, BERS and BERS*. A framework is developed based on our analytical studies and simulation findings. We focus on the level of energy consumption, the search latency and the energy-time efficiency, and analyse the performance of these protocols for route discovery. Different strategies are compared in their mathematical models and in reference to ERS as a standard. Our results show that BERS* has achieved the optimal performance of this category of protocols in terms of energy-time efficiency. The framework and our results have practical implications on protocol design and analysis, as well as theoretical interests.