Performance study of a multipath routing method for wireless mobile ad hoc networks

A Mobile Ad hoc NETwork (MANET) is a collection of wireless mobile computers forming a temporary network without any existing wire line infrastructure. Due to the dynamic nature of the network topology and the resource constraints, routing in MANETs is a challenging task. Multipath routing can increase end-to-end throughput and provide load balancing in wired networks. However, its advantage is not obvious in MANETs because the traffic along the multiple paths may interfere with each other . In addition, without accurate knowledge of topology, finding multiple disjoint paths is difficult. We propose an on-demand method to efficiently search for multiple node-disjoint paths and present the criteria for selecting the multiple paths. We also perform a simulation study on the proposed method. The purpose of this paper is to present the advantages as well as some difficulties of deploying multipath routing in MANETs.