Performance Optimization Using Multipath Routing in Mobile Ad Hoc and Wireless Sensor Networks
Wenjing Lou, Wei Liu, Yanchao Zhang · Kluwer Academic Publishers eBooks · 2006
Multipath routing has been a promising technique in MANETs and WSNs. It has been shown through both theoretical analysis and simulation results that multipath routing provides many performance benefits, including improved fault tolerance, security, and reliability, improved routing efficiency and reduced routing overhead, more balanced traffic load and energy consumption, reduced end-to-end latency, and aggregated network bandwidth, etc. Significant research efforts have been made and are continuously being made in developing multipath routing protocols and multipath packet forwarding techniques in order to achieve the above-mentioned performance gains effectively and efficiently. Nevertheless, many issues that are directly related to the application of multipath routing remain untouched, such as the integration of the multipath routing into the current single-path routing paradigm, the synchronization of the packets among the multiple paths, and the interfaces of multipath routing protocols to other layers of protocol in the network protocol stack, etc. Due to space limitations, we are only able to introduce the basic concept of multipath routing, highlight the fundamental techniques used to find the multiple paths, and outline the essential idea of what and why it can help in performance. For detailed algorithms/protocols as well as performance evaluations, interested readers are referred to respective publications.