Load-balanced routing through virtual paths: highly adaptive and efficient routing scheme for ad hoc wireless networks

Routing protocols for ad hoc wireless networks consider the path with the minimum number of hops as the optimal path to any given destination. However, this strategy does not balance the traffic load over the network, and may create congested areas. These congested areas greatly degrade the performance of the routing protocols. In this paper, we propose a routing scheme that balances the load over the network by selecting a path based on traffic sizes. We present a simulation study to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.