Modeling of multipath multihop routing in ad hoc networks

Recent researches have shed light on the usage of multipath routing in mobile ad hoc networks where more than one route will be searched and maintained between every source-destination pair. Compared with traditional single-path routing, utilizing multiple paths in parallel would be of benefit to reduce end-to-end delivery delay as well as split traffic for load balancing to achieve better utilization of bandwidth resource. Besides, multipath routing will enhance the route robustness in the sense of reducing path broken probability. In this paper, we propose an analytical modeling framework to investigate multipath routing in multihop networks. The single-path model is considered as a multi-node M/M/1 tandem network, and the multi-path model as a set of multiple parallel paths. This proposed framework allows us to investigate issues such as optimal load distribution, end-to-end delay and multipath routing reliability in ad hoc networks. Due to the flexibility, our modeling framework is applicable to heterogeneous network as well as homogenous case.