A multipath routing scheme combating with frequent topology changes in wireless ad hoc networks

Abstract

The main challenge in mobile ad hoc networks is how to discover and maintain the routes to the destinations in the wireless environment with frequent dynamic topology changes, which results from the random movements of stations. According to the number of available paths to the destination, the prior proposed routings can be classified into unipath and multipath protocols. In this paper, to combat the frequent topology changes, we propose a neighbor-table-based multipath routing scheme which utilizes the advantages of multipath routings. In NTBMR, we introduce time-driven and data-driven mechanisms to set up the neighbor table. During route discovery, a joint route selection criterion which utilizes multiple attributes of the route is employed. Simulation results show that our multipath scheme can improve the network performance in terms of packet delivery ratio and end-to-end delay, which is important for real-time applications. However, the advantages are achieved at the cost of overhead about 7% higher than that of the unipath routing.