A Multi-Path Routing Protocol Based on Divide and Conquer Strategy in Ad Hoc Network

Routing in MANETs can be accomplished through either single path or multiple paths. Multipath routing may be used for various other reasons such as load-balancing, congestion avoidance, lower frequency of route inquiries and to achieve a lower overall routing overhead and better fault-tolerance. However, multipath routing shows degraded performance with increased distance between the source node and the destination node. Following a policy of divide and rule, a node-balanced scheme is proposed to solve this problem. In the proposed scheme, first the unipath routing protocol is used to find the best routing path from the source node to the destination node; then the routing path is divided into several segments and every segment is traded with the multipath routing policy. As every segment has the best performance, the performance of the whole network is improved accordingly. Furthermore how the moderate node is chosen to replace the failed node between the two adjacent segments is also discussed. Simulation results show that the new scheme not only significantly improves the performance of the network , but also can find more number of routing paths when increasing the distance between the source nodes and the destination nodes. The new scheme is also very easy to implement.