A Novel Multipath Routing Protocol for MANETs

This paper proposes a novel multipath routing protocol for MANETs. The proposed protocol is a variant of the single path AODV routing protocol. The proposed multipath routing protocol establishes node-disjoint paths that have the lowest delays based on the interaction of many factors from different layers. Other delay aware MANETs routing protocols don´t consider the projected contribution of the source node that is requesting a path into the total network load. The implication is that end to end delay obtained through the RREQ is not accurate any more. On the contrary of its predecessors, the proposed protocol takes into consideration the projected contribution of the source node into the computation of end to end delay. To obtain an accurate estimate of path delay, the proposed multipath routing protocol employs cross-layer communications across three layers; PHY, MAC and Routing layers to achieve link and channel-awareness and creates an update packet to keep the up to date status of the paths in terms of lowest delay. The performance of the proposed protocol investigated and compared against the single path AODV and multipath AOMDV protocols through simulation using OPNET. Results have shown that our multipath routing protocol outperforms both protocols in terms of average throughput, end to end delay and packet dropped.