Investigating the Load Balance of Multi-Path Routing to Increase the Lifetime of a MANET

Multi-path routing can provide higher bandwidth and better packet delivery ratio for multimedia applications than traditional shortest path routing protocols. Multi-path routing protocols try to use multiple simultaneous paths to transfer data messages. While it might increase the bandwidth and the delivery ratio, it also distributes the traffic load more evenly over the network. This load balance can be used to increase the lifetime of a MANET, as it will avoid using only one route for many times. This article explores the load balance technique showing that it is possible to increase the network lifetime up to 22 minutes using this technique alone. The energy consumption of a MANET unit can be split into control (59%), data (34%) and routing (7%) packets. The energy used only by the network interface card can also be separated into the energy used by sending or receiving packets, in this case approximately 89% is used to receive packets. All these values were obtained through simulations on GloMoSim, performed using real values from a Compaq WL110 network interface card connected to an HP IPAQ 3600 handheld.