Load-Balanced Route Discovery for Mobile Ad hoc Networks

This paper presents Flow-Aware Routing Protocol (FARP), a new routing strategy designed to improve load balancing and scalability in mobile ad hoc networks. FARP is a hop-by-hop routing protocol, which introduces a flow-aware route discovery strategy to reduce the number of control overheads propagating through the network and distributes the flow of data through least congested nodes to balance the network traffic. FARP was implemented in Glomosim and compared with AODV. To investigate the load distribution capability of FARP new performance metrics were introduced to measure the data packet flow distribution capability of the each routing protocol. The simulation results obtained illustrate that FARP achieves high levels of throughput, reduces the level of control overheads during route discovery and distributes the network load more evenly between nodes when compared to AODV. This paper also describes a number of Alternative strategies and improvements for the FARP