Associativity-Based On-Demand Multi-Path Routing In Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

This paper is primarily concerned with multi-path routing in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). We propose a novel associativity-based on-demand source routing protocol for MANETs that attempts to establish relatively stable path(s) between the source and the destination. We introduce a new notion for gauging the temporal and spatial stability of nodes, and hence the paths interconnecting them. The proposed protocol is compared with other unipath (DSDV and AODV) and multi-path (AOMDV) routing protocols. We investigate the performance in terms of throughput, normalized routing overhead, packet delivery ratio etc. All on-demand protocols show good performance in mobile environments with less traffic overhead compared to proactive approaches, but they are prone to longer end-to-end delays due to route discovery and maintenance.