Performance analysis of reactive shortest path and multipath routing mechanism with load balance

Research on multipath routing protocols to provide improved throughput and route resilience as compared with single-path routing has been explored in details in the context of wired networks. However, multipath routing mechanism has not been explored thoroughly in the domain of ad hoc networks. In this paper, we analyze and compare reactive single-path and multipath routing with load balance mechanisms in ad hoc networks, in terms of overhead, traffic distribution and connection throughput. The results reveals that in comparison with general single-path routing protocol, multipath routing mechanism creates more overheads but provides better performance in congestion and capacity provided that the route length is within a certain upper bound which is derivable. The analytical results are further confirmed by simulation.