A novel routing protocol for ad hoc sensor networks using multiple disjoint paths

Routing in ad hoc sensor networks is a complicated task because of many reasons. For traffic engineering, multipath capabilities are important. This paper, a source routing based multi-path OLSR (SR-MPOLSR) protocol is proposed. In this protocol, MPRs (multi-point relays) are used to obtain the network topology effectively and multiple Dijkstra algorithms are used to calculate multiple routes and to allocate the loads in a weighted round-robin fashion. Data transmission at the source is carried out through predetermined multiple paths (hence source routing). Our experiments have shown that SR-MPOLSR can, to some extent, increase the utility of network resources and network throughput, improve robustness and reliability of the transmission service, and reduce the average transmission delay.