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This paper discusses online power-aware routing in large wireless ad-hoc networks for applications where the message sequence is not known. We seek to optimize the lifetime of the network. We show that online power-aware routing does not have a constant competitive ratio to the off-line optimal algorithm. We develop an approximation algorithm called max-min zP_min that has a good empirical competitive ratio. 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 quite good.