Load Balanced Multipath Routing in Mobile Ad hoc Network

A critical issue in the design of ad hoc network is the development of efficient routing protocols that can provide high quality communication for each data session and especially in the presence of a large amount of traffic. Several routing protocols have already been proposed. However, most of them focus only on single path routing. In this paper, we propose a load balancing technique based on multipath routing called LOBAM (load balanced multipath routing) and apply our scheme as an extension to the OLSR (optimized link state routing) protocol. In LOBAM routing, traffic is routed over multiple paths simultaneously. Our protocol uses a per packet allocation scheme to distribute data packets into multiple paths considering the load in its neighborhood. A simulation study is performed in heavily loaded network to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme in comparison with the existing best effort OLSR protocol in terms of queuing delay, buffer size and packet delivery