Multipath Routing Based Quality of Service Enhancement in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Streaming multimedia applications over Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) create new challenges to routing protocols in terms of stringent performance requirements. A MANET inherently depends on the routing scheme employed to provide expected Quality of Service (QoS). Multipath routing protocols have proved to enhance the performance of MANET in terms of reliability, load balancing, multimedia streaming and security, etc. In the present paper, the original DSR protocol was modified by using multiple resource utilization thresholds as QoS attributes and trigger multi-path-routing and load-sharing during the periods of congestion to improve QoS in MANETs. NS-2 simulation was used to evaluate the performance of the modified DSR in predefined workload scenarios with respect to throughput, number of dropped packets and end-to-end delay, and compared with original DSR. The results showed that a significant improvement in the performance of modified DSR was achieved with the use of multi-path routing especially from the point of view of demanding applications such as real time video and voice streaming.