On a Self-Organizing Multipath Routing Protocol in Mobile Wireless Networks

In this paper, we present a self-organizing multipath (SOMP) routing protocol aiming at enhancing success rates of delivery of data packets end-to-end, restricting the routing overhead, and being robust to unstable network conditions. In this SOMP protocol, each mobile host sets up multiple beacons at other hosts to indicate routes to reach it. A beacon is an ordered list of mobile hosts along a path going from the host which holds the beacon, to the host which sets up the beacon. Two functionalities are used for routing data packets to their destinations. The first functionality is a beacon-seeking mechanism, which helps data packets to obtain beacons leading to the destinations of the data packets. The second functionality is a source routing mechanism, which is similar to the one used in Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol and is used to forward data packets to their destinations using the beacons obtained. A balanced binary search tree is used in the SOMP protocol as the embedded forwarding structure, which is built on the identifiers of mobile hosts. This search tree serves for both distributing beacon updates and routing data packets to obtain beacons. The actual routes taken by data packets are jointly determined by the embedded forwarding structure and the underlying network connectivity.