Routing improvement using multiple disjoint paths for ad hoc networks

Multi-hop wireless ad hoc networks have the potential to dramatically reduce the cost of deploying communication infrastructure. However, the nature of this technology limits the capacity of radio links. Thus, it is important to utilize them as efficiently as possible. Routing in ad hoc networks is a complicated task because of many reasons. For traffic engineering, multipath capabilities are important. In this paper, a source routing based multi-path OLSR (SR-MPOLSR) protocol is proposed. In this protocol, MPRs (multi-point relays) are used to obtain the network topology effectively and multiple Dijkstra algorithms are used to calculate multiple routes and to allocate the loads in a weighted round-robin fashion. Data transmission at the source is carried out through predetermined multiple paths (hence source routing). Our experiments have shown that SR-MPOLSR can, to some extent, increase the utility of network resources and network throughput, improve robustness and reliability of the transmission service, and reduce the average transmission delay