A Survey of Multipath Routing Schemes of Wireless Mesh Networks

There have been many advances in the area of routing in wireless mesh networks and a multitude of routing algorithms have been proposed. In the recent past, a class of routing protocols called multipath routing has gained favour amongst researchers. As opposed to uni path routing where one single path is used to send data from a source to a destination, in multipath routing, multiple paths are used to route data. The idea of using multiple paths to deliver data lends itself well to a wireless multihop network, given its broadcast nature and high connectivity and can offer significant advantages over traditional single path routing – increased reliability, ability to load balance data flows which improves network performance, allows quick recovery from route failures and throughput aggregation. This paper provides brief overviews of the protocols that employ this method and identifies the challenges involved in such a routing strategy