A Congestion Adaptive Hybrid Multi - path Routing Protocol for Load Balancing in Mobile

In Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET), the network congestion can rigorously depreciate the network throughput. Also the network congestion results in the packet losses, bandwidth degradation and energy expenditure. Hence a load balancing scheme is required to prevent the network from congestion and exhaustion of resources of congested node. In this paper, we propose a congestion adaptive multi-path routing protocol for load balancing in MANET. When the source node wants to forward the data packet to the destination, it utilizes the reactive route discovery technique where the multiple paths are established using multi-path Dijkstra algorithm. In the discovered route, when any node detects congestion, it intimates the source with congestion notice message. The source node upon receiving the message distributes the data packets through the multiple paths available in its route cache using random transmission technique. If the source does not find any routes in its route cache, then it re-establishes multiple paths and distributes the traffic. By simulation results, we show that the proposed approach alleviates the network congestion.