Load balancing of multipath source routing in ad hoc networks

A load-balancing scheme has a significant effect on the performance of the multipath routing protocol, especially in an ad hoc network environment. In order to analyze the effect on the distribution of input traffic among multiple paths in MSR (multipath source routing), we first established a network queuing model that would incorporate the cross-traffic among these paths. We then considered the load balancing as an optimization problem. The solution to the optimization problem is interestingly in accordance with the heuristic equation proposed by Wang ICC'2001 (2001). Our simulation results show that MSR with load balancing is so effective that the end-to-end delay is decreased significantly while the network resource can be utilized more efficiently than that in DSR (dynamic source routing).