Multipath routing modeling in ad hoc networks

Multipath routing in mobile ad hoc networks has recently received more research efforts, where more than one route will be searched and maintained between every source destination pair. Compared with traditional single-path routing, utilizing multiple paths in parallel would be of benefit to reduce end-to-end delivery delay as well as to split traffic for load balancing to achieve better utilization of bandwidth resources. Besides, multipath routing will enhance the route robustness in the sense of lengthening route lifetime. In this paper, we propose an analytical modeling framework to investigate multipath routing in ad hoc/multihop networks. The single-path model is considered as a multi-node M/M/1 tandem network, and the multi-path model as a set of multiple parallel paths. This proposed framework allows us to investigate issues such as optimal load distribution, end-to-end delay and multipath routing reliability in ad hoc networks. Due to the flexibility, our modeling framework is applicable to a heterogenous network as well as the homogenous case.