Cross-layered MAC and Multipath Routing Protocols in Multi-Hop Wireless Mobile Networks

In this paper, we propose a multipath routing scheme for wireless mobile networks which extends the Ad Hoc On-demand Multipath Distance Vector (AOMDV) routing protocol, by introducing a novel load-balancing approach to concurrently distribute the traffic among the multiple paths. The traffic-path allocation scheme is based on cross-layer measurements of path statistics reflecting the size and congestion level of each path. In order to provide an efficient support to the proposed routing scheme at the MAC layer, we also study the composition effect of a IEEE 802.11-based enhanced MAC forwarding mechanism called Fast Forward (FF), used to reduce the effects of self-contention among frames at the MAC layer. The protocol framework has been modelled and extensively simulated for a large set of metrics and scenarios. Simulation results provide guidelines for multi-hop communication solutions under both static and mobile scenarios and different traffic loads.