NICE-MRP: A near-optimal radio-interference aware multi-path routing protocol for MANETs

Nowadays, with the miniaturization of communication devices, dense and highly mobile ad-hoc networks are very common. Besides, more and more devices have several radio interfaces. In such an environment, multi-path routing should be considered. Yet, only few multi-path ad-hoc routing protocols take into account the radio-interferences which might arise between two geographically close routes. Moreover, they generally only forbid the addition of interfering paths rather than looking for a different, more optimized, solution. This paper presents NICE-MRP, a novel multi-path routing protocol for mobile ad-hoc networks giving efficient solutions with respect to physical radio-interferences between paths. This protocol discovers and stores several combinations of non-interfering multi-path routes. The best multi-path route is used to transmit data, whereas alternative multi-path routes are kept to dynamically react to route breakages due to mobility and node failures. Compared to other well-known protocols, NICE-MRP presents good qualities in terms of latency, overhead and packet losses. Besides, these results end to be rather independent from the degree of mobility.