Stable node-disjoint multipath routing with low overhead in mobile ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc networks are characterized by the use of wireless links with limited bandwidth, dynamically varying network topology and multi-hop connectivity. AODV and DSR are the two most widely studied on-demand ad hoc routing protocols. Previous work has shown some limitations of the two protocols: whenever there is a link break on the active route, each of the routing protocols has to invoke a route discovery process. This leads to an increase in both delay and control overhead as well as a decrease in packet delivery ratio. To alleviate these problems, we modify and extend AODV to include the path accumulation feature of DSR in route request/reply packets so that lower route overhead is employed to discover multiple node-disjoint routing paths. The extended AODV is called stable node-disjoint multipath routing (NDMR) protocol, which has two novel aspects compared to the other on-demand multipath protocols: it reduces routing overhead dramatically and achieves multiple node-disjoint routing paths. Simulation results show that performance of NDMR is much better than that of AODV and DSR.