A multipath traffic balancing proposal to reduce gaming disconnections in MANET

In this work, we aim to improve the gameplay of time-sensitive video games over MANETs. We focus on disconnections problem. Precisely, if the path between a game client and the server breaks, the game on the player side freezes and becomes unplayable until that the network re-establishes the path toward the server. In MANETs, these disconnections occur mainly because of nodes mobility. To overcome this problem, we propose in this paper a multipath approach, which will compute for each source-destination couple two paths. The first path is constructed using end-to-end delay metric. The latter has a well-known impact on the gameplay of time sensitive multiplayers games. The second path is constructed once we have removed from the topology the link in the first path with the lowest ETX value. An adaptive traffic balancing algorithm is also considered. The proportion of traffic carried by each path depends on its robustness. The results for our experiments, which are based on a real implementation of our proposals, show that using multipath and balancing traffic among different paths reduce routes failures and thus improves the gameplay.