QoS Based Evaluation of Multipath Routing Protocols in Manets

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) are wireless networks formed by several nodes communicating on a peer-to-peer basis without being connected to any fixed infrastructure. These nodes could be laptop computers, personal digital assistants, mobile phones or sensors dispersed in an area to measure certain data and send the information to a larger node. Where a source node and a destination node are not within direct range, they communicate through multi-hop routing, i.e. nodes in between them relay messages between source and destination. The routing protocol plays a key role in finding and maintaining the route in MANETs. Routing protocol can be a uni-path and multi-path. A multipath routing protocol is designed to increase the reliability in MANET. This research work focuses on Quality of Service (QoS) based evolution of multipath routing protocol. For this purpose, diverse type of simulation scenarios is designed to find the impact of mobility, increasing the number of nodes and pause time in MANETs. The results revealed that multipath routing protocol has comparatively less delay (percentage decrease of 81.52%). While unipath routing protocols have less packet drop ratio (percentage decrease of 47.78%) and routing overhead (percentage decrease of 99.30%).