On-demand Partial-Disjoint Multipath Routing with Low Delay for Wireless Ad-hoc Networks

Wireless ad-hoc networks are characterized by the lack of infrastructure, use of wireless links with limited bandwidth and frequent topological changes. On-demand multipath routing in wireless ad-hoc networks is effective in providing resilience to route failures and to successful load balancing. Previous work shows that on-demand multipath routing protocols achieve lower end-to-end delay, routing overheads and higher goodput under certain scenarios when compared to traditional single-path counterparts. In this paper, a Shortest Multipath Source Routing (SMS) protocol is proposed a multipath extension to DSR supporting multimedia applications. The proposed protocol builds multiple partialdisjoint paths that are shorter when compared to multiple linkdisjoint or node-disjoint paths and, in so doing, reduce delays and overheads incurred when recovering from route breaks. Simulation results show that the protocol achieves lower end-toend delay and higher goodput compared with DSR and SMR. Keywordsad-hoc networks; multipath routing; multimedia applications; shortest multipath source routing; partial-disjoint