A Study Of Multipath Routing With Load Balancing Mechanisms In Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Wireless Ad Hoc networks are composed of mobile stations which communicate with each other through wireless links without any infrastructures set up ahead. Due to the limited coverage of the radio wave, routes are mainly multihop in Ad Hoc networks. It is the mobility and power limitation that make searching proper routes for two nodes an arduous task. The routing protocol plays a crucial role in the Ad Hoc networks. An excellent routing protocol can not only obtain one or multiple suitable routes from source to destination but also avoid the condition that some nodes are congested while other nodes are idle, which means to minimize the maximum utilization while supporting the same traffic demands and make the load balanced evenly. Most of previously Ad Hoc routing protocols, however, did not take into account the load balancing policy. These algorithms are inclined to distribute the traffic as much as possible on the shortest path. This paper, thus, focus on how to make these classic algorithms work with mechanism of load balancing.Ad Hoc routing protocols are introduced briefly and the key problems of multipath routing mechanism with load balancing policy (MRLB) are summarized in this paper. Based on these studies, we introduce a new kind of MRLB mechanism, which is called AOMDV_LB. Meanwhile, the basic idea and processing flow of AOMDV_LB are also introduced. Finally, we make some evaluations and comparisons between AOMDV_LB, AODV and AOMDV, under different network scale and traffic load, with the help of NS2. Results show that AOMDV_LB has better performances in terms of end-to-end delay and throughput. Due to the Load Packets sent periodically to source, the routing load of AOMDV_LB is slightly larger than AOMDV, but much lower than AODV.