Multipath Routing with Load Balancing in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract: In recent years, routing research concerning wired networks has focused on minimizing the maximum utilization of the links which is equivalent to reducing the number of bottlenecks while supporting the same traffic demands. This can be achieved using multipath routing with load balancing instead of single path routing using of routing optimizers. However, in the domain of ad hoc networks multipath routing has not been investigated in depth. We would like to develop an analogy between wired and wireless networks, but before that we need to identify the major differences between these two in the case of multipath routing. First, in order to increase the network throughput, the multiple paths have to be independent so they don't share the same bottlenecks. Then, due to radio propagation properties the link capacity is not constant. So using the maximum utilization metric for wireless networks is not suitable. Based on the research done in wired networks, which has shown that using multiple paths with load balancing policies between sourcedestination pairs can minimize the maximum utilization of the links, we investigate if this is applicable to ad hoc networks. This paper proposes a multipath routing algorithm with a load balancing policy. The results obtained from an indoor 802.11g network highlight two major points. The maximum throughput is not achieved with multipath routing, but with single path routing. However, the results on the delivery ratio are encouraging, indeed we observe a real improvement thanks to our multipath routing algorithm.