A flexible and tunable route discovery mechanism for on-demand protocols

Mobile ad-hoc networks are characterized by multihop wireless links and absence of cellular infrastructure. For the last years, routing has been the area under most intensive research. In particular, on-demand routing protocols proposed are extremely attractive due to their low-overhead and efficiency. Currently, wireless ad-hoc networks lack multipath routing protocols. Multipath routing enables increased QoS support, load balancing and enhanced route stability. In this paper we present a new route discovery solution that increases the number of routes found, while reducing the routing overhead when compared to previous proposals. Simulation results show that the additional routing overhead imposed is low, and also some improvements are achieved in terms of goodput for both TCP and UDP traffic at average node speeds.