Abstract

With the popularity of multimedia, there is a growing tendency in the demand of high traffic flows in mobile Ad Hoc networks (MANETs). However, the limited bandwidth of wireless network has become the principal factor that restrains the development of multimedia applications. Multi-path routing improves end-to-end throughput through parallel transmission with multiple paths between source and destination, thus satisfying the bandwidth requirement of multimedia applications. This paper studies the relationship between the number of non-interference parallel paths and the end-to-end throughput, and then concludes that routing can achieve the optimal performance when the number of parallel paths is 2. Based on the analysis, this paper presents a Bandwidth aware Multi-path Routing (BMR) protocol, which can find two disjoint parallel paths between source and destination based on the available bandwidth restriction. In BMR, the available bandwidth of node is obtained based on a cross-layer mechanism, which can provide a metric for routing discovery. Simulation results show that BMR performs well in improving end-to-end throughput, packet delivery ratio, and end-to-end delay. Therefore, it is more suitable for multimedia traffic than existing protocols.

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