MALB: MANET adaptive load balancing

Mobile Ad hoc networks (MANET) have attracted a great portion of people's research interest in recent years. Load balancing is emerging as a key tool to better use MANET resources and improve MANET performance. Since multipath routing can provide improved throughput, route failure protection and load balancing as compared with single-path routing, in this paper, we propose a load balancing mechanism called Multipath adaptive load balancing (MALB). Our goal is to distribute the traffic among multiple paths dynamically based on measurement of path statistics to minimize the network congestion; as a result end-to-end delay is minimized. MALB is a general framework and can cooperate with any kind of multipath source routing protocol. MALB can be implemented in an asynchronous, distributed format in mobile ad hoc network. Simulation results show that our load balancing mechanism is effective and get better performance in both stationary and mobile scenarios.