MALB: MANET adaptive load balancing

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) have attracted much research interest in recent years. MANET has a dynamic network topology, and resources, such as bandwidth, buffer space, battery power and so on, are constrained. Distributing traffic fairly among the mobile hosts is helpful in order to take full advantage of the limited resources in MANET. However, the prevailing routing protocols do not take load balancing into account. We propose a load balancing mechanism called multipath adaptive load balancing (MALB). Our goal is to distribute the traffic among multiple paths dynamically, based on measurement of path statistics, and to use network resources better so that the congestion and end-to-end delay are minimized. MALB is a general framework and can cooperate with any kind of multipath source routing protocol. Simulation results illustrate that our load balancing mechanism shows effectiveness and better performance in both stationary and mobile scenarios.