A novel multiple routes discovery scheme for mobile ad hoc networks

Multiple route information is often necessary for ad hoc networks, to recover from quick topology and link status change, and to support load balanced multi-path routing as well as QoS consideration. However, most such research focused on multiple routes utilization or specific QoS metric design, and few of them consider how to obtain such multiple route information efficiently. In this paper we propose a novel multiple routes discovery scheme to obtain multiple route information within a short period. In this scheme, multiple route request (RREQ) are collected and corresponding route information are incorporated into one route reply (RREP). Furthermore, Cooperation between routing layer and Media Access Control (MAC) layer is used to avoid duplicate RREP transmissions and reduce collisions. Consequently, multiple route information can be obtained promptly and efficiently. Simulation results show that compared with conventional routing protocols, this scheme could achieve better performance in terms of average route discovery latency, normalized routing/MAC load, as well as the packet delay and delivery ratio.