Load-balancing mechanism for real-time traffic in wireless ad hoc networks

Recently the requirement for wireless ad hoc networks to support multimedia services like videoconference and VOD has become more and more urgent, and load balancing is recognized as an effective mechanism to satisfy the real-time requirements of these services. But many current ad hoc routing protocols are single-path and best-effort routing, which aren't fit for load balancing. In this paper a node-disjoint multi-path routing protocol, namely Enhanced Multi-path Routing (EMR), is first presented to fulfill the short end-to-end delay and low package loss rate requirements of real-time traffic. Then the policy of how to balance load over multiple paths is discussed based on EMR in the paper. According to some key factors that can affect the performance of load balancing, a load-balancing weight (LBW) equation is formed to describe our load-balancing algorithm quantitatively. The simulation results indicate that the proposed load-balancing mechanism decreases the end-to-end delay and the packet loss rate of real-time traffic.