Measuring the effectiveness of Multi Path Routing as a function of increased path availability

Mobile Ad-hoc networks (MANETs) are self organizing, infrastructure-less and multi-hop packet forwarding networks. Apart from the normal responsibility, each node has the additional responsibility that it also acts as a router. The dynamic behavior, distributed control and scarcity of resources makes routing in ad hoc networks, a tricky task. Several studies proclaim the benefits accrued from multi path routing, when compared with single path routing. These studies have compared multi path routing vis-à-vis single path routing and demonstrated the advantages associated. But not much work has been done to demonstrate that the benefits of Multi Path Routing become less pronounced, as more and more alternate paths are put to disposal. For this we define a term Multi Path Routing Index (MRI), as the maximum number of paths selected for routing data packets, out of the total available data paths. In this paper, a new multi path routing protocol is implemented, which allows us to vary and control actual number of alternate paths. We try to investigate the effects of increasing alternate paths at our disposal, on the overall network performance.