Stable on-demand multipath routing for mobile ad hoc networks

On-demand routing protocols, which are widely used in mobile ad hoc networks, are mostly proposed to build and maintain a single route for each source-destination pair. Whenever an active route fails due to node mobility, a new route discovery process will be invoked. This leads to network performance degradation. To alleviate this problem, a novel Stable On-demand Multipath Routing (SOMR) protocol is proposed. SOMR uses source routing approach to establish nodedisjoint primary routes and it builds several backup paths among each primary route synchronously by utilizing overheard route reply packets. By constructing such multipath routes, the protocol not only provides higher network stability, but also reduces route discovery latency and routing overheads. Simulation results show that SOMR always offers a better routing performance, i.e, in packet delivery ratio, average delay and normalized load metrics, than AOMDV and AODV on a variety of mobility and traffic conditions.