Performance of multipath routing for on-demand protocols in mobile ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc networks are characterized by multi-hop wireless links, absence of any cellular infrastructure, and frequent host mobility. Design of efficient routing protocols in such networks is a challenging issue. A class of routing protocols called on-demand protocols has recently found attention because of their low routing overhead. The on-demand protocols depend on query floods to discover routes whenever a new route is needed. Such floods take up a substantial portion of network bandwidth. We focus on a particular on-demand protocol, called Dynamic Source Routing, and show how intelligent use of multipath techniques can reduce the frequency of query floods. We develop an analytic modeling framework to determine the relative frequency of query floods for various techniques. Our modeling effort shows that while multipath routing is significantly better than single path routing, the performance advantage is small beyond a few paths and for long path lengths. It also shows that providing all intermediate nodes in the primary (shortest) route with alternative paths has a significantly better performance than providing only the source with alternate paths. We perform some simulation experiments which validate these findings.