Performance analysis of cross-layered multipath routing and MAC layer solutions for multi-hop ad hoc networks

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Abstract
Multipath routing schemes could exploit multiple disjoint routes between any source and destination node, in order to provide aggregate bandwith, fault-tolerance and load-balancing properties. In this paper, we propose a multipath routing scheme for mobile ad hoc networks which extends the Ad Hoc On-demand Multipath Distance Vector (AOMDV) routing protocol, by introducing a novel load-balancing approach to concurrently distribute the traffic among the multiple paths. The traffic-path allocation scheme is based on cross-layer measurements of path statistics reflecting the size and congestion level of each path. In order to provide an efficient support to the proposed routing scheme at the MAC layer, we also study the composition effect of a MAC forwarding mechanism called Fast Forward (FF), which attempts to reduce the effects of self-contention among frames at the MAC layer. The combined solutions have been modeled and simulated for a large set of scenarios. Results show advantages and drawbacks resulting in guidelines for multi-hop communication under both static and mobile scenarios and different traffic loads.