A neighbor-table-based multipath routing in ad hoc networks

Due to station mobility, the network topology is continuously changing in mobile ad hoc networks. In this paper, we propose a neighbor-table-based multipath routing (NTBMR) protocol to track the dynamic topology changes. Distinguished from prior work on multipath protocols employing disjoint paths, NTBMR does not require the routes to be disjoint. In order to verify the different capabilities against dynamic topology changes for disjoint and non-disjoint multipath routings, we make an attempt to analyze their route reliabilities. Theoretical analysis reveals that non-disjoint multipath routing has higher route reliability when the wireless links are unreliable. In NTBMR scheme, we also present a technique to estimate the mean and variance of the lifetime of a wireless link, which can be used to aid route discovery and maintenance. Simulation results show that our multipath routing scheme is relatively robust in an environment with frequent topology changes and can improve the end-to-end delay and packet delivery ratio performance substantially compared to unipath routing.