Bandwidth-aware multipath routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

Real-time video transmission in mobile ad hoc networks is an important yet challenging problem. A Bandwidth-aware Multi-path Routing Protocol is proposed to support QoS for real-time video delivery under ad hoc network environments. We incorporate the on-demand node-disjoint multi-path routing scheme with the bandwidth estimation method. In this approach, multiple node-disjoint paths are formed during the route discovery process and are actively maintained. The detector packets measure the available bandwidth of each hop along the paths. The approximate bandwidth of a node is estimated based on the bandwidth consumption information indicated in the modified HELLO messages. The estimated bandwidth is used as the metric to choose the primary route. Simulation results show that packet delivery rate increases a lot, and end to end delay and jitter decrease significantly, while the overhead is not increase too much, compared with original single path routing protocol.