MP-DSR: a QoS-aware multi-path dynamic source routing protocol for wireless ad-hoc networks

Routing in wireless ad-hoc networks has received significant attention in the literature due to the fact that the dynamic behavior of these networks poses many technical challenges on the design of an effective routing scheme. Though on-demand routing approaches have been shown to perform well, they generally lack the support for quality-of-service (QoS) with respect to data transmission. In order to select a subset of end-to-end paths to provide increased stability and reliability of routes, a new QoS metric, end-to-end reliability, is defined and emphasized. We present a distributed multi-path dynamic source routing protocol (MP-DSR)for wireless ad-hoc networks to improve QoS support with respect to end-to-end reliability. Our protocol forwards outgoing packets along multiple paths that are subject to a particular end-to-end reliability requirement. A simulation study is performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed protocol, particularly the fact that MP-DSR achieves a higher rate of successful packet delivery than existing best-effort ad-hoc routing protocols, such as the dynamic source routing (DSR).