Adaptive load balancing in mobile ad hoc networks

In this paper, we propose a prediction based adaptive load balancing mechanism for mobile ad hoc networks. This mechanism can cooperate with any kind of multipath source routing protocol. It distributes traffic load among multiple disjoint paths based on the measurement and prediction of network traffic. In order to predict network traffic accurately, we first analyze the traffic data collected in our mobile ad hoc network testbed and find out that ad hoc networks traffic is self-similar. Then, we propose a traffic predictor based on wavelet analysis. The simulation results show that our loading balancing approach can distribute traffic properly and lead to a decrease of traffic load imbalance of multiple paths and network congestion. As a result, it reduces the end-to-end packet delay and packet dropping probability and balances the energy consumption of the network.