On throughput and load balancing of multipath routing in wireless networks

In this paper we investigate the relative performance of two multipath routing schemes in relatively static and highly error-prone wireless networks (e-g., sensor networks), namely, selective preferential forwarding (SPF) (or primary/secondary routing) and recently proposed selective random forwarding (SRF), in terms of their packet throughput and traffic load distribution. For meshed multipath, aiming at achieving a good performance trade-off, we introduce a novel hybrid packet forwarding scheme that takes advantage of more uniform load distribution of SRF and a higher end-to-end throughput of SPF. Our approach is guided by analytic intuition and verified by simulations.