A Novel Effective Multipath Routing Technique Providing High Availability in Wireless Networks

Abstract

Wireless networks, such as mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) or wireless sensor networks (WSNs), usually suffer link failures and topology changes, due to the mobility of wireless nodes, the insufficient power of wireless nodes, the unstable state of wireless links, and unpredictable environmental interference. If any link or node failure occurs, a lack of fault-tolerant mechanisms may lead to the interruption of active communication between the source and destination nodes. Multipath routing protocols have been proposed to solve the problem. In this paper, we propose a novel multipath routing approach called node-disjoint multipath routing (NDMR) for discovering and establishing two node-disjoint paths between a source and a destination in a wireless network. The proposed approach uses the request-reply mechanism to find the node-disjoint paths. However, it discards duplicates of request messages instead of re-broadcasting them as occurs in several existing approaches. Additionally, NDMR uses a two-way handshake or three-way handshake process for discovering the node-disjoint paths. If the destination can find two node-disjoint paths in the first route discovery, it uses the two-way handshake process. Otherwise, it applies the three-way handshake process. By decreasing the number of steps in the route discovery process, NDMR reduces the route discovery time achieved by existing techniques. These advantages make NDMR very useful for applications that demand high availability and fault tolerance in MANETs and WSNs. The performance of NDMR has been analyzed, evaluated, and compared with that of several existing approaches. Various simulations were conducted to validate the analyzed results. The analyzed and simulated results show that NDMR significantly reduces the control overhead as well as the time required, by existing approaches, for route discovery.