Investigating the Performance of a Multipath DYMO Protocol for Ad-Hoc Networks

An ad-hoc network is a network whose particular characteristics include absence of any kind of infrastructure, dynamic topology and limited resources. Up to day, several routing protocols have been proposed to face such a hostile environment. These solutions usually provide to the sources of data flows with single valid paths towards their destinations. However, it has been proven that maintaining multiple paths can be favorable to the network, either using the paths at the same time (for load balancing) or using an alternative path, when the primary one fails. It is also a way to meet the Quality of Service requirements demanded by some particular applications. In this paper, we propose a novel routing mechanism based on Dynamic MANET On-demand (DYMO) routing protocol, in order to enable the establishment of more than one node disjoint routes towards the same destination. Simulation results show that there is a significant gain in end-to-end delay for data packets and a reduction in the number of the transmitted routing packets.