Effective Multipath Routing Scheme for Wireless Mesh Networks

Routing protocols for multi-hop wireless networks have traditionally used shortest path routing to obtain paths to destinations and do not consider traffic load or delay as an explicit factor in the choice of routes. The main objective is to construct a perfect flow-avoiding routing, which can boost the throughput provided to each user over that of the shortest path routing by a factor of four when carrier sensing can be disabled or a factor of 3.2 otherwise. The protocol is developed that adaptively equalizes the mean delay along all utilized routes from a source to destination and does not utilize any routes that have greater mean delay. This is the property satisfied by a system in Wardrop equilibrium. The routing protocol is 1) completely distributed, 2) automatically load balances flows, 3) uses multiple paths whenever beneficial, 4) guarantees loop-free paths at every time instant even while the algorithm is suntil converging, and 5) amenable to clean implementation. Keywords- Wireless networks, Wardrop equilibrium, routing protocols, delay-adaptive multipath routing. I