Congestion adaptive multipath routing for load balancing in Mobile Ad hoc Networks

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Abstract
Congestion control and load balancing have been challenging tasks in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET) due to the dynamic and un-predictable behaviour and topology change of such networks. For effective load balancing and congestion control, routing metrics need to accurately capture the load in various locations of the network. In this paper, we present a congestion adaptive multipath routing protocol to increase the throughput and avoid congestion in MANETs. In our approach when the average load of an existing link increases beyond a defined threshold and the available bandwidth and residual battery energy decreases below a defined threshold, traffic is distributed over fail-safe multiple routes to reduce the traffic load on a congested link. Through simulation results, we show that our proposed approach achieves better throughput and packet delivery ratio with reduced delay for constant bit rate (CBR) traffic when compared with QMRB, a protocol using mobile routing backbones.