The design and performance evaluation of a proactive multipath routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

Due to unpredictable network topology changes, routing in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET) is an important and challenging research area. The routing protocol should detect and maintain a good route(s) between source and destination nodes in these dynamic networks. Many routing protocols have been proposed for mobile ad hoc networks, and none can be considered as the best under all conditions. This thesis presents the design and implementation of a new proactive multipath MANET routing protocol. The protocol, named Multipath Destination Sequenced Distance Vector (MDSDV), is based on the well known single path Destination Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV). We show that the protocol finds node-disjoint paths, i.e., paths which do not have any nodes in common, except for the source and the destination. The thesis presents a systematic evaluation of MDSDV in comparison with three well known protocols: one proactive (DSDV), and two reactive (AODV) and (DSR). MDSDV behaves very well in terms of its packet delivery fraction and data dropped in both static and dynamic networks. It delivers nearly 100% of data in dense networks (networks with more than 20 nodes). The speed of the nodes and the number of sources have a low impact on its performance.