M-DART: multi-path dynamic address routing

The paper proposes a Distributed Hash Table (DHT)-based multi-path routing protocol for scalable ad hoc networks. Specifically, we propose a multipath-based improvement to a recently proposed DHT-based shortest-path routing protocol, namely the Dynamic Address RouTing (DART). The resulting protocol, referred to as multi-path DART (M-DART), guarantees multi-path forwarding without introducing any additional communication or coordination overhead with respect to DART. The performances of M-DART have been evaluated by means of numerical simulations across a wide range of environments and work loads. The results show that M-DART performs the best or at least comparable with respect to widely adopted routing protocols in all the considered scenarios. Moreover, unlike these protocols, it is able to assure satisfactory performances for large networks by reducing the packet loss by up to 75%. Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.