A Link Quality Based Dispersity Routing Algorithm for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Multipath routing mechanisms have been preferred over single path routing to provide parallel fail safe paths and to maximize throughput. Applying traditional shortest path metric for multipath route selection leads to traffic concentration at some nodes resulting in congestion, thereby causing performance degradation . Interference caused due to neighbouring node traffic is another factor that further limit its performance gains. Towards this, to ease out congestion and improve network resource utilization we devise a load balancing strategy that splits the load among multiple paths according to link quality. Link quality metric is formulated considering the current load condition , traffic interference and energy of the intermediate nodes. To study the effectiveness of the proposed load distribution method we compare it with another load balancing strategy that forwards traffic along one path ,found using our link quality metric and which switches over to alternate best path on route failure. Simulation results conducted show that proposed load splitting strategy is able to achieve improvement in performance in terms of reduced latency and improved throughput. Network Life time is also improved.