SMS: Shortest multipath source routing for mobile ad-hoc networks

In recent years, on-demand multipath routing protocols have been a key research area in mobile ad-hoc networks. Such protocols are crucial in providing resilience to route failures and to successful load balancing. Previous work shows that on-demand multipath routing protocols achieve lower end-to-end delay, routing overheads and higher goodput under certain scenarios when compared to traditional single-path routing protocols. In this paper, the Shortest Multipath Source (SMS) routing protocol is proposed. The proposed protocol builds multiple partial-disjoint paths that are shorter when compared to multiple link-disjoint or node-disjoint paths and, in so doing, reduce end-to-end delay and routing overheads incurred when recovering from route breaks. Simulation results show that SMS outperforms the competing protocols with respect to a number of key performance metrics.