Multipath Load Balancing Technique for Congestion Control in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a collection of wireless mobile nodes that can communicate without any centralized administration or fixed infrastructure. Because of limited wireless link capabilities, nodes with heavy traffic will reduce their energy rapidly and increases the possibility of congestion and path disconnection. Hence, load balancing and congestion is necessary in MANET. Thus, this paper explores an efficient routing technique called multipath load balancing technique for congestion control (MLBCC) in MANETs to efficiently balance the load among the multiple paths by reducing congestion. The proposed protocol performs two major functions during the data transmission process, firstly, congestion detection by using an arrival rate and an outgoing rate at a particular time interval T. Secondly, selection of gateway node using link cost and the path cost to efficiently distribute the load by selecting the most desirable paths. For an efficient flow of distribution, a node availability degree standard deviation parameter is introduced. The results of our experiments show performance improvements in terms of average end-to-end delay, packet delivery ratio and packet drop ratio in comparison with AOMDV and FMLB.