A Novel Load Balancing Scheme for Multipath Routing Protocol in MANET

The recent advancements in information and communication technology create a great demand for multipath routing protocols. In MANET, nodes can be arbitrarily located and can move freely at any given time. The topology of MANET can change rapidly and unpredictably. Because wireless link capacities are usually limited, congestion is possible in MANETs. Hence, balancing the load in a MANET is important since nodes with high load will deplete their batteries quickly, thereby increasing the probability of disconnecting or partitioning the network. To overcome these, the multipath protocol should be aware of load at route discovery phase. The main objective of the proposed article is to balance the load on a node and to extend the lifetime of the node due to the congestion, energy depletion and link failures. This article describes a novel load and congestion aware scheme called Path Efficient Ad-hoc On-demand Multipath Distance Vector (PE-AOMDV) protocol to increase the performance of routing process in MANET in terms of congestion, end-to-end delay and load balancing. A new threshold value and a counter variable are introduced to limit the number of communication paths passing over a node in route discovery phase. For every new request the counter variable is incremented by one and the threshold value is compared to see whether the maximum number of connections has been reached or not. The proposed method is network simulator ns-2 and it is found that there is a significant improvement in the proposed scheme. It reduces the energy consumption, average end-to-end delay and normalized routing overhead. Also the proposed scheme increases packet delivery ratio, throughput and minimizes routing overheads.