A Reliability-based Framework for Multi-path Routing Analysis in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Abstract: Unlike traditional routing procedures that, at the best, single out a unique route, multi-path routing protocols discover proactively several alternative routes. It has been recognized that multi-path routing can be more efficient than traditional one mainly for mobile ad hoc networks, where route failure events are frequent. Most studies in the area of multi-path routing focus on heuristic methods, and the performances of these strategies are commonly evaluated by numerical simulations. The need of a theoretical analysis motivates such a paper, which proposes to resort to the terminal-pair routing reliability as performance metric. This metric allows one to assess the performance gain due to the availability of route diversity. By resorting to graph theory, we propose an analytical framework to evaluate the tolerance of multi-path route discovery processes against route failures for mobile ad hoc networks. Moreover, we derive a useful bound to easily estimate the performance improvements achieved by multi-path routing with respect to any traditional routing protocol. Finally, numerical simulation results show the effectiveness of this performance analysis.