MRS: A click-based multipath routing simulator

The ability to forward traffic on multiple paths would be useful for customizing paths for different applications, improving reliability and balancing load. In order to evaluate the behaviour and performance of multipath routing protocols both simulators and test beds are often used. The simulator is used in the first stages and the test bed is used in the final stages of the development process. However, when moving from simulation to test bed, source code usually needs to be re-implemented. In this paper, we present MRS to address these issues. It was constructed by embedding the Click Modular Router inside of the NS2 simulator. The source code with MRS may run on an actual system as well as under a simulator with minor modifications. We implement a multipath routing protocol called AMIR in MRS. Simulation results show that MRS is a useful and effective tool for evaluating multipath routing protocols. The results also indicate that multipath routing has a greater advantage in improving network performance than single-path routing.