Spatially Disjoint Multipath Routing protocol without location information

Abstract

Multipath routing permits the discovery and use of multiple paths between a source and a destination. We develop a distributed on-demand multipath routing protocol for MANETs capable of finding spatially disjoint paths without location information. The use of spatially disjoint routes in multipath routing is important due to the non-interfering nature of the paths. This enables applications such as load-balancing, bandwidth aggregation, secure communications and multimedia transmission. Most of the proposed multipath protocols for MANETs focus on reliability and are not adequate for these types of applications because of route coupling between alternate paths. We propose Spatially Disjoint Multipath Routing (SDMR) protocol, capable of finding multiple paths in one route discovery, measuring the distance between them and choosing paths with most separation. SDMR is evaluated through simulation.