Dynamic multipath routing for MANETs — A QoS adaptive approach

A MANET is a collection of wireless mobile stations with limited resources that can exchange information each other without any fixed infrastructure. It is a challenging task to design an efficient routing protocol for MANETs which supports diverse quality requirements like road or accident guidance, health care applications, dynamic database access, E-Commerce and multiuser games. Recent research shows that single path routing protocols fail to overcome the limitations of MANET routing such as frequent link failures and dynamicity. Frequent route breaks lead to repeated route discovery process and thereby increased control overhead and packet drop. Multipath routing protocols reduce the overheads in MANET routing by reducing the number of route discoveries and provide more throughput. Most of the recent approaches to select and maintain alternative routes in multipath routing lack a common metric for route selection which selects routes based on specific quality characteristics of routes. In this paper we propose a new dynamic multipath routing method which avoids stale routes by periodic maintenance, provides route switching prior to route breakage. This method always selects the best quality route based on the value of a tunable route metric which is calculated dynamically by considering the durability, consistency and quality of all individual paths and thereby gives quality routes suitable for diverse QoS requirements.