Selecting stable route in multipath routing protocols

Link failure due to node mobility is routine in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). A standard approach to deal with such failures is to select stable routes instead of the shortest route. However, protocols that select stable route do not attempt to optimize the number of hops and hence do not guarantee improvement in performance. Another approach to handle mobility induced route failure is multipath reactive protocols. These protocols start forwarding the packet on the first available route and switches path when a route failure is detected. Although these multipath protocols save on route rediscovery overhead, we establish that they still incur a substantial overhead called route handover cost, while switching among the alternate paths. In this work, we propose a light weight metric link lifetime, which helps to choose a stable path in multipath protocols. We incorporate link lifetime in standard multipath protocol and show that it reduces routing overhead and consequently improves throughput.