Directional Antenna for Multipath Ad Hoc Routing

Multipath routing can be effectively used to maximize the utilization of network resources for real-time traffic. In mobile ad-hoc network environments, this approach can suffer from co-channel interference due to the simultaneous transmission of packets via multiple routes. In this paper, by exploiting the directionality of directional antennas, a Directional Dynamic Source Routing (DDSR)-based Multipath routing protocol is proposed for mobile wireless ad hoc networks. Three metrics are considered in the route discovery process in order to select the best multiple routes. These are hop count, beam overlaps, and the number of joint nodes between the different routes. The proposed directional routing protocol has shown to be capable of minimizing inter-path and intra-path interference, hence significantly improving the system throughput performance for simultaneous transmission of multimedia information over multiple routes.