Load balanced routing in mobile ad hoc networks

We present a new protocol called Load Aware Routing in Ad hoc (LARA) networks protocol for efficient data transmission in mobile ad hoc networks. We also define a new metric for routing called traffic density to represent the degree of contention at the medium access control layer. During the route setup, this metric is used to select the route with the minimum traffic load. We have carried out extensive simulation studies to evaluate the performance of our proposed protocol vis-a-vis the existing protocols. Performance results show that our LARA protocol outperforms existing routing protocols in terms of end-to-end delay, throughput, packet delivery fraction, and battery power consumption at the nodes.