Design and Performance Evaluation of Multipath Extensions for the DYMO Protocol

In this paper we propose a multipath extension to dynamic MANET on-demand (DYMO) routing protocol. Multipath protocols have been shown to benefit on-demand routing in MANETs, where the knowledge of alternate paths allows to reduce the frequency of route discovery in the presence of link failures. Route discovery is an operation which accounts for most of the overhead of these protocols. This is specially helpful in scenarios with node mobility where link failures are frequent. Our extension is based on AOMDV. It can discover multiple disjoint paths in one route discovery with minimal additional overhead over DYMO. We analyze the performance gains of using alternate path information with DYMO. Simulation results show that multipath routing greatly benefits DYMO in reducing overhead and therefore increasing performance.