A Multipath Layered Cluster Based Routing for Ad Hoc Networks

In ad hoc networks, hierarchical routing is viewed as an effective solution to face scalability problems. Such routing relies on a subset of nodes to reduce control overhead associated to routing tasks and preserve network resources. Multipath routing can also be adopted in order to exploit suitably network resources by allowing load balancing and route fault tolerance. Combining the benefits of hierarchical routing and multipath routing can improve significantly the network performances and cope better with mobility. The main contribution of this paper is to propose a multipath extension of a hierarchical routing, which constructs link-disjoint paths and selects less congested and correlated paths for an efficient data transfer and resources use. The performance of our multipath algorithm is witnessed by simulation results. These results indicate that our proposed multipath extension is more effective under various traffic loads in terms of packet delivery ratio and control overhead.