A Multipath Routing Method with Dynamic ID for Reduction of Routing Load in Ad Hoc Networks

In recent years, ad hoc networks have attracted a great deal of attention. Ad hoc networks consist of nodes with wireless communication devices without any base stations or fixed infrastructures. Most routing protocols of ad hoc networks form a single-path. Single-path routing protocols need to repair routes each time the route has broken. This route repair generates a lot of control packets, and an increase in end-to-end packet delay. In order to compensate for these drawbacks of the single path routing, multipath routing schemes have been proposed. AOMDV (Ad hoc On-demand Multipath Distance Vector routing) is one multipath routing scheme. AOMDV constructs routes by flooding Route Request (RREQ) messages. When the number of nodes increases in the network, the routing load of AOMDV, which is defined as the ratio of the number of control packets to the number of delivered packets, may increase immensely. On the other hand, DART (Dynamic Address RouTing) has been proposed for a large scale network. In DART, the dynamic routing address has a tree-based logical structure related to connectivity between adjacent nodes. In this paper, we propose a multipath routing scheme to solve the above problems of AOMDV. The proposed scheme is an extension of DART for dealing with multiple paths. The proposed scheme aims to reduce the routing load and adapt to large ad hoc networks. We evaluated its performance by comparing it with AODV and AOMDV through simulation experiments. Performance metrics are the number of control packets and the routing load. Simulation results indicate the proposed scheme can reduce the number of control packets and the routing load.