Throughput maximizing routing in a MANET: protocol and analysis

Wireless bandwidth is a limited and scarce shared resource in MANETs. In our work, we are interested in the "end-to-end capacity" of the network, which we define to be the sum of the throughputs for each flow. This represents the service a network provides to its users. In this paper, we propose a routing protocol, called TB for traffic balancing, which increases the end-to-end capacity by more aggressively routing data through underutilized areas of a MANET. Simulation results show that TB performs better than other load-balancing protocols proposed in the literature. We also compare the experimental performance against lower bounds of maximum end-to-end capacity, discuss reasons for the performance gap, and identify possible future improvements to the protocol.