EAOMDV-MIMC: A Multipath Routing Protocol for Multi-Interface Multi-Channel Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Multipath routing has been proposed to improve performance of mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). However, due to: (1) nodes lacking of network interface and (2) route coupling, using multiple paths concurrently in conventional single channel MANETs rarely exhibit performance gain. To improve performance, an ad-hoc routing protocol (and its extension) that utilizes multiple homogeneous network interface is proposed in this paper. Unlike other related multi-channel routing protocols, channels are not assigned. Instead, nodes are allowed to make use of all available channels they are tuned to. In the base protocol, nodes estimate channel conditions by monitoring their network interface queues and distribute data packets to different channels and next-hops according to their conditions. In the extended protocol, estimated channel condition at a node is further propagated to neighboring nodes by piggybacking channel condition information in data packets. With overhearing, other nodes can retrieve this information to make better next-hop selections. Extensive simulation studies show that our protocol outperforms other related multi-channel routing protocols.