Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/wcm.432 Ad hoc on-demand multipath distance vector routing

We develop an on-demand, multipath distance vector routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks. Specifically, we propose multipath extensions to a well-studied single path routing protocol known as ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV). The resulting protocol is referred to as ad hoc on-demandmultipath distance vector (AOMDV). The protocol guarantees loop freedom and disjointness of alternate paths. Performance comparison of AOMDV with AODV using ns-2 simulations shows that AOMDV is able to effectively cope with mobility-induced route failures. In particular, it reduces the packet loss by up to 40 % and achieves a remarkable improvement in the end-to-end delay (often more than a factor of two). AOMDV also reduces routing overhead by about 30 % by reducing the frequency of route discovery operations. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. KEY WORDS: mobile ad hoc networks; multihop wireless networks; on-demand routing; multipath routing; alternate path routing; fault tolerant routing; distance vector routing; disjoint paths 1