Multipath load balancing in multi-hop wireless networks

Multi-hop wireless networks have the potential to dramatically reduce the cost of deploying communication infrastructure. However, the nature of this technology limits the capacity of radio links. Thus, it is important to utilize them as efficiently as possible. In this paper, we investigate load balancing across multiple paths as a possible mechanism to improve performance in multi-hop wireless networks. Given the inherent interference of multi-hop transmissions in a single radio channel, it is generally assumed that single-channel multipath routing cannot provide any benefits, but in fact would have detrimental effects on resource efficiency. However, a careful investigation of the issue reveals that under certain theoretic conditions, significant gains are possible. In fact, we show throughput improvements of 80-100% in some scenarios. We present a novel interference metric to assess the quality of a set of disjoint paths. We further present a heuristic path selection algorithm to find appropriate routing paths in structured networks, which is a first step towards the application of our basic results in realistic scenarios.