NDMA: A node disjoint multi-path ad hoc routing protocol

An ad hoc network is a cooperative engagement of a collection of mobile nodes without the required intervention of any centralized access point or existing infrastructure. Developing efficient multi-path routing protocols in ad hoc environment is a challenging task due to changing network connectivity. Specifically, at low mobilities, the performance of most of the existing protocols is fairly good, but at high mobilities and stressful environments, their performance is not as good as expected. We have designed a new routing protocol called Node Disjoint Multi-path Ad hoc Routing (NDMA), which gives multiple node-disjoint paths between a source and a destination pair. Our protocol is capable of routing the traffic over multiple paths. We have analyzed the performance of our protocol by carrying out simulations and compared its performance with existing single path such AODV and multi-path version of DSR protocol. We observed that NDMA performs much better than AODV and DSR. The metrics in our performance analysis are normalized routing load and average end to end delay. We have also proposed a model for the expected lifetime after which a fresh route discovery has to be initiated in case of disjoint multipath routing.